Performance of the communication layers of TCP/IP with the Myrinet gigabitLAN

This paper presents the performance of the Myrinet Gb/s LAN with the TCP/IP communication protocol in a cluster of Pentium based workstations. We syst ematically measured the bandwidth and latency of the different layers of th e TCP/IP software and the Myrinet firmware/hardware, in order to expose bot tlenecks in different levels of the communication protocol stack. Our study identified several bottlenecks that could impair the performance of TCP/IP for other Gb/s LANs, e.g. Gigabit Ethernet. The paper presents details of our performance measurements and suggests means to improve the overall perf ormance of the communication subsystem. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.