Flexible mechanisms for performance enhancements of cluster networks

Networks connecting nodes in clusters, in their current forms, stand to benefit from performance enhancements in measures such as latency, throughput, and reliability. Providing flexible mechanisms to enhance one or more of these performance properties will result in drastic improvements in applications performance on clusters. In this paper, we identify the different flexibility requirements for enhancing end-to-end cluster network properties. Flexible cluster-networking mechanisms utilizing multiple networks are introduced to enhance the network properties such as communication throughput and short message transfer time. In addition, it provides an easy and flexible way to extend the network capacities for specific nodes. The experimental evaluations reported here illustrate the advantages of the proposed model.