Communication on the Paragon

In this note the authors describe the results of some tests of the message-passing performance of the Intel Paragon. These tests have been carried out under both the Intel-supplied OSF/1 operating system with an NX library, and also under an operating system called SUNMOS (Sandia UNM Operating System). For comparison with the previous generation of Intel machines, they have also included the results on the Intel Touchstone Delta. The source code used for these tests is identical for all systems. As a result of these tests, the authors can conclude that SUNMOS demonstrates that the Intel Paragon hardware is capable of very high bandwidth communication, and that the message coprocessor on Paragon nodes can be used to give quite respectable latencies. Further tuning can be expected to yield even better performance.