Benchmarking and performance evaluation of NCHC PC cluster

This paper presents the benchmarking results and performance evaluation of the PC cluster built at the National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) in Taiwan. The evaluation compares different cluster architecture and software platforms. The results indicate that PC cluster in general has the advantage of better cost/performance ratio, and has the potential to outperform some conventional parallel machines, such as IBM SP2, for specific application problems. However, the performance of PC cluster is largely application-dependent. The results in this paper provide useful information about what kinds of applications have the largest potential to take advantage of PC clusters and about the relative advantage of different cluster architectures and software platforms.