SCI MULTIPROCESSOR PC CLUSTER IN A WINDOWSNT ENVIRONMENT

We present experiences and performance results of a SCI multiprocessor PC cluster in a WindowsNT environment. The cluster consists of person al computers connected with PCI communication cards based on the SCI c ommunication standard. The SCI communication technology enables remote memory access to the physical distributed memory of the cluster from all over the network. The standard operating system WindowsNT extended with a small interface for the remote memory access is used on all co mputer systems. This paper briefly describes the main characteristics of the evolving SCI technology and the applied hardware. Several SCI c ommunication topologies are studied. We will end with performance meas urements and the achieved benchmark results.