BIB-VERSION:: CS-TR-v2.0
ID:: ncstrl.dartmouthcs//TR95-273
ENTRY:: January 8, 1996
ORGANIZATION:: Dartmouth College, Computer Science
TITLE:: A Performance Comparison of TCP/IP and MPI on FDDI, Fast Ethernet, and Ethernet
TYPE:: Technical Report (paper)
REVISION:: 3
AUTHOR:: Nog, Saurab   
AUTHOR:: Kotz, David
DATE:: January 1996
RETRIEVAL:: For a paper copy, email <reports@cs.dartmouth.edu>
RETRIEVAL:: For a paper copy, write to
       Technical Report Librarian
       Department of Computer Science
       Dartmouth College
       6211 Sudikoff Laboratory
       Hanover, NH 03755-3510
       USA
RETRIEVAL:: Compressed Postscript at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/TR95-273.ps.Z
RETRIEVAL:: PDF at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/TR95-273.pdf
ABSTRACT:: Communication is a
very important factor affecting distributed applications. Getting a
close handle on network performance (both bandwidth and latency) is
thus crucial to understanding overall application performance. We
benchmarked some of the metrics of network performance using two sets
of experiments, namely roundtrip and datahose. The tests were designed
to measure a combination of network latency, bandwidth, and
contention. We repeated the tests for two protocols (TCP/IP and MPI)
and three networks (100 Mbit FDDI (Fiber Distributed Data Interface),
100 Mbit Fast Ethernet, and 10 Mbit Ethernet). The performance results
provided interesting insights into the behaviour of these networks
under different load conditions and the software overheads associated
with an MPI implementation (MPICH).  This document presents details
about the experiments, their results, and our analysis of the
performance. 
 Revised on 1/8/96 to emphasize our use of a particular MPI
implementation, MPICH.
END:: ncstrl.dartmouthcs//TR95-273