Dolphin Wulfkit

[Joachim Worringen]

Kevin Van Workum wrote:
> 
> I know this has been discussed before, but I'd like to know the "current"
> opinion. What are your experiences with the Dolphin Wulfkit interconnect?
> Any major issues (compatability/linux7.2/MPI/etc)? General comments.

Oh oh, this is a sensitive topic. I'll try to give my modest opinion and
some personal experiences...

Wulfkit is a very solid, high-quality MPI implementation on top of a
well-performing interconnect - and it's highly optimized for this
interconnect. It includes a more or less full featured cluster
environment software to monitor and manage your cluster. From my
personal experiences, it is very stable and performs well, however, I am
not really an application developer/user, but an MPI developer.

To compare Wulfkit (SCI + ScaMPI) with "the other" well-known (probably
better known) cluster interconnect (Myrinet2000 + MPICH-GM), I have put
results of some PMB runs on a P4-i860 cluster with both, SCI and
Myrinet, at http://www.lfbs.rwth-aachen.de/users/joachim/pmb_results .
Please note that the i860 is quite a bad chipset for both SCI and
Myrinet as it has disappointing PCI performance for DMA and PIO as well
(relative to the performance potential of 64bit/66Mhz PCI). Anyway, look
at the numbers if you are interested. I really don't want to discuss the
relevance of such benchmarks and the type of the test platform (again);
anybody is free to interprete them at it's own standard, requirements
and experience. 

Of course, there is also a nice open-source no-cost MPI on top of the
same hardware (SCI-MPICH, which I have written ;-)); for more info see
URL in signature. This performs also quite nice and has a number of
unique features ScaMPI/Wulfkit does not have. But I need to say that it
surely isn't as well tested as ScaMPI is, and it is just an MPI and no
cluster environment. 

  Joachim
 
-- 
|  _  RWTH|  Joachim Worringen
|_|_`_    |  Lehrstuhl fuer Betriebssysteme, RWTH Aachen
  | |_)(_`|  http://www.lfbs.rwth-aachen.de/~joachim
    |_)._)|  fon: ++49-241-80.27609 fax: ++49-241-80.22339