An evaluation of message passing implementations on Beowulf workstations

Beowulf workstations have become a popular choice for high-end computing in a number of application domains. One of the key building blocks of parallel applications on Beowulf workstations is a message passing library. While there are message passing library implementations available for use on Beowulf workstations, as of yet none have been specifically tailored to this new, unique architecture. Thus it is important to evaluate the existing packages in order to determine how these perform in this environment. This paper examines a set of four message passing libraries available for Beowulf workstations, focusing on their features, implementation, reliability, and performance. From this evaluation we identify the strengths and weaknesses of the packages and point out how implementations might be optimized to better suit the Beowulf environment.