Multicast performance analysis for high-speed torus networks

Overall efficiency of high-performance computing clusters not only relies on the computing power of the individual nodes, but also on the performance that the underlying network can provide to the computational application. Although modern high-performance networks, especially system area networks (SAN), have high unicast performance, they do not support multicast communication in hardware. This research experimentally evaluates the performance of various protocols for unicast-based and path-based multicast communication on high-speed torus networks. Software-based multicast performance results of selected algorithms on a 16-node Scalable Coherent Interface (SCI) torus are given. The strengths and weaknesses of the various protocols are illustrated in terms of startup and completion latency, CPU utilization, and link utilization and concurrency.