This study compares the performance of these computers on a collection of test suites designed to evaluate serial and parallel performance for scientific computing. IBM also provides an optimized version of PVM, called PVMe. Performance results for both PVM and PVMe are reported for the IBM SP2. Methodology Comparison among the machines is made by measuring their performance on a variety of test suites. Single node performance is compared by measuring the performance of a collection of scientific kernels and application codes.
Parallel performance is determined by single node performance and communication performance.
Communication performance is evaluated by measuring the time required to send varying sized messages in a variety of communication patterns. Parallel performance is evaluated by measuring the performance of a parallel matrix multiply and three parallel application codes. Performance was enhanced by calling the PVM subroutine pvmfsetopt . An advantage of the workstation clusters considered in this report is that each node has its own local disc for fast storage of temporary data. Whenever feasible, test suites are designed to evaluate performance for small, medium and large problems so the dependence of performance on problem size can be seen.