Performance characteristics of a network of commodity multiprocessors for the NAS benchmarks using a hybrid memory model

Multiprocessors and high performance networks offer the opportunity to construct CLUster of MultiProcessors (CLUMPs) and use them as parallel computing platforms. The distinctive feature of the CLUMPs over traditional parallel computers is their hybrid memory model (message passing between the nodes and shared memory inside the nodes). We investigate the performance characteristics of a cluster of biprocessor PCs for the NAS 2.3 parallel benchmark using a programming model based on MPI for message passing between biprocessor nodes and OpenMP for shared memory inside biprocessor nodes. The paper provides several contributions. These include: speed-up measurements of a cluster of biprocessor PCs over a cluster of uniprocessor PCs using the hybrid memory model; a detailed analysis of the speed-up results from a breakdown of the benchmarks execution time; and a performance comparison of a commodity CLUMP with some high performance parallel computers.