Improvement of Bonding driver and application to parallel processing on commodity PC cluster

We have studied various methods for improving the performance of PC clusters. Most of them have used special hardware, non standard protocols, so that need special added library and complex programming, tending to raise their cost and to spoil their flexibility. To solve their problems we propose improving of Bonding driver. This improvement have a good influence on some kinds of parallel applications on commodity PC clusters without costing a great deal, using comparatively simple method where distribute sending frames to multiple network interface cards (hereafter NICs) on a round-robin basis. This means divide communication loads equally between multiple NICs attached to each PC. We measured the maximum bandwidth and parallel performance for the PC cluster with Gigabit Ethernet. A result shows our proposal method improves the bandwidth and the performance of several parallel benchmarks in comparison with the system using single NIC (hereafter 1NIC) and existing Bonding driver (hereafter Bond). The bandwidth comes up to 1,249 Mbps which is 1.33 times and 1.47 times faster than those of 1NICand Bond. The bandwidth of Bond cannot even reach that of 1NIC. The results of SP and BT in NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB) come up to 1,715 Mop/s and 5,264 Mop/s which are 1.81 and 1.63 times faster than 1NIC, 1.17 and 1.15 times faster than Bond respectively.