A high-performance mixed-technology LAN for education and research

In this work we describe a series of performance tests on different archite ctures of high bandwidth local area networks, contemporarily in use at C.I. L.E.A. (Inter-University Consortium for Automatic Elaboration of Lombardy) to connect multi-processor machines devoted to educational and research pur poses, such as fluido-dynamic and mechanical simulations. This LAN is essen tially made out of a standard FDDI ring, and an HyperFabric backbone. Hyper Fabric is a Hewlett-Packard high performance network system bus, with a dec lared maximum bandwidth of 2.5 Gbit/s full duplex per link. We present a co mparison, in terms of effective bandwidth, average throughput and CPU consu mption of the above mentioned network systems. Furthermore we also describe the effects, in terms of transfer efficiency, of such a mixed environment, in which different systems co-exist and must often be cross-walked by vari ous applications, as backups and mass storage access. Measurements and comp arisons are made using Open Software tools like netperf and NetPIPE.