A communication benchmark tailored to intel broadwell nodes and tuned to the DEAC cluster

Various benchmarks exist for assessing performance characteristics of commodity hardware utilized in high performance computing (HPC) cluster environments. An additional assessment of bandwidth for Intel's 44-core processors considers network saturation via message passing focused on indirectly connected cores. The benchmark developed in this work provides a means of measuring bandwidth of two Broadwell nodes when communicating inter-chassis with all cores of each node utilized. This benchmark was developed in three phases using Message Passing Interface (MPI). First, the bandwidth measure was tested for MPI_Send operations in point-to-point communication. Second, the merge sort algorithm was implemented as a means of assessing bandwidth and a tree-structured communication algorithm was developed and implemented to maximize internode communication and minimize intra-node communication. Third, the benchmark was tuned to the configuration of the Distributed Environment for Academic Computing (DEAC) Cluster. A second benchmark removing local computation from the merge sort algorithm effectively performs a gather operation in a tree-structure. These benchmarks were tested and compared with relevant Intel MPI Benchmarks (IMB) tests. In the developed benchmarks, the nodes requested significantly more bandwidth than in the existing MPI_Gather operation and IMB benchmarks due to the large size of the messages simultaneously placed on the network.