A Simple Method Using Multi-Core and Multiple GbE Ports for Improving Parallel Performance in Commodity PC Cluster

Due to advent of powerful and easily available Multi-Core PC clusters, the computation performance of each node is dramatically increased and this trend will probably continue in the future. On the other hand, the use of powerful network systems (Myrinet, Infiniband, etc.) is expensive and tends to increase the difficulty of programming and degrades portability because they need dedicated libraries and protocol stacks. This paper proposes portable method to improve bandwidth-oriented parallel applications by improving the bandwidth performance without the above dedicated hardware, libraries, protocol stacks and IEEE802.3ad (LACP). Since the proposed method is introduced only by loading the proposed driver without modifying TCP/IP protocol stacks and existing applications, it has advantages in both high portability and stability. The proposed method also performs better than IEEE802.3ad without LACP switches and LACP drivers. Moreover LACP performance is influenced by the network parameters (MAC addresses, IP addresses, VLAN id, etc.) because its distribution algorithm uses these parameters. On the other hand, the proposed method shows the stable effect regardless of these parameters.