Performance Comparison of Different High-Speed Networks with a Uniform Efficient Programming Interface

The communication network and its interface are an important factor for the performance of modern cluster computing systems. During the last years, several new approaches were developed which yield higher bandwidth and lower latency than traditional alternatives. However, applications often can exploit the performance of the underlying network only by using specially tuned programming interfaces. This dependency makes porting the applications difficult if not impossible. Therefore, with HPCC (High Performance Cluster Communication) we have designed a programming interface which enables applications to use different high speed networks in a uniform and efficient manner. Currently it is implemented for four high speed networks: HIC, SCI, Gigabit Ethernet, and Myrinet. This paper gives a short overview of the HPCC programming interface, and presents comparative figures for the performance of basic operations on four different high speed network technologies