Parameterisation to tailor commodity clusters to applications
Parallel applications can be parameterised by the quotient ?a of flop/s and data transfers between the processors, and by the machine-dependent, maximum local processor performance ra. Clusters can be parameterised by the quotient ?m of ra and the per processor network communication bandwidth bm. All those parameters are predictable. In parallel machines, the communication time is smaller than the computing time if ?m<?a. A first principles chemistry application is described and parameterised. Benchmarks on the Swiss-T1 cluster machine show that the predicted inter-processor communication and computing times correspond well to the measured times. These parameterisations can now be used to tailor clusters from commodity components to the applications.
cluster computing commodity computing scientific applications