The design goal of our communication model is for performance understanding of the cluster communication system, which is driven by a lightweight messaging protocol on a commodity interconnect. As advances in networking technology demands for a low-overhead communication system, that delivers the best performance to high-level applications. When designing lightweight messaging systems, system designers are facing with design options that affect the overall performance, such as balance of workload between different hardware resources, or support multiprogramming verse dedicated use, etc. However, some design issues may turn out to have serious impedance on the performance than others when porting across different network technologies. In this chapter, we show how our communication model is used to delineate the performance characteristics of a lightweight messaging system, as well as to calibrate the performance results and assess various design tradeoffs.
We first give a general introduction on the sample lightweight communication package, the Directed Point. Next, we characterize the performance of Directed Point protocol with respect to our parameter set. During the analysis, we are comparing two different implementations of Directed Point that based on different network technologies, and we comment on their relative strength and weakness. We then make use of the available information to evaluate and analyze on the observed throughput of these communication systems. Finally, we summarize the results of this chapter.