Computation and I/O benchmarks on networks of workstations

This paper examines the performance characteristics of several parallel and I/O benchmark suites implemented with the PVM and PIO US systems for network of workstation computing environments. The results are compared to previous performance reports for the same benchmarks. The benchmarks include the NAS parallel benchmarks, the NHT-1 I/O benchmarks, and the PAT benchmark. Our results indicate performance improvements that are consistent with increase in processor speeds and system memory size. In some cases we obtained performance comparable to Cray Y/MP-1 on a cluster of 12 high-end workstations with ATM interconnection, in other cases, performance within an order of magnitude of Cray Y/MP-1 was obtained.