Scalability and performance of two large Linux clusters

In this paper, we present performance results from several parallel benchma rks and applications on two large Linux clusters at Sandia National Laborat ories. We compare the results on the Linux clusters to performance obtained on a traditional distributed-memory massively parallel processing machine, the Intel TeraFLOPS. We discuss the characteristics of these machines that influence the performance results and identify the key components of the s ystem that are important to allow for scalability of commodity-based PC clu sters to hundreds and possibly thousands of processors. (C) 2001 Academic P ress.