Test Method and Hardware

In order to test the efficiency of dual nodes we can employ tests from the Beowulf Performance Suite (BPS) (http://www.plogic.com/bps). We used two motherboards:

• Tyan 2762 with dual Athlon MP 1600+ (1.4Ghz) processors, 2 GByte, RAM, running kernel 2.4.20
• Supermicro P3TDL3 with dual Tualatin 1.26 Ghz processors, 2 GByte of RAM, running kernel 2.4.18

Both the Intel V6 (icc and ifc) compilers and the GNU V2.96 (gcc and g77) were used to compile the programs. Information about the test programs and the compile arguments can be found in the NAS suite in the BPS package.

A simple script has been written to run the tests and calculate the speedup for the NAS test suite. The NAS test suite is compiled for one node using test size A. The script was run three times for and the results were averaged. The compiler can be changed by editing the ``run_suite'' line in the script.