Evaluation of applications on a loosely-coupled cluster

NIST is building a distributed testbed of heterogeneous workstations connected via an Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) network. Currently, the ATM network cluster consists of Sun, Silicon Graphics, and Intel-based workstations. The purpose of the ATM cluster testbed is twofold, one is production and the other is research. The production focus is concerned with evaluating the beneet of bringing ATM to the desk-top and determining the scalability and viability of such an environment for some of the NIST high performance computation workload. The research focus is concerned with integrating performance measurement for application tuning and developing light weight models that can be used to dynamically steer applications based on real-time measurements. Our initial eeorts of porting and tuning parallel codes in this distributed environment are discussed.