Myrinet, ANSI/VITA 26-1998, is a high-speed

local area network A local area network (LAN) is a computer network that interconnects computers within a limited area such as a residence, school, laboratory, university campus or office building. By contrast, a wide area network (WAN) not only covers a larger ...

ing system designed by the company Myricom to be used as an interconnect between multiple machines to form

computer cluster A computer cluster is a set of computers that work together so that they can be viewed as a single system. Unlike grid computers, computer clusters have each node set to perform the same task, controlled and scheduled by software. The comp ...

Description

Myrinet was promoted as having lower protocol overhead than standards such as

Ethernet Ethernet () is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...

, and therefore better

throughput Network throughput (or just throughput, when in context) refers to the rate of message delivery over a communication channel, such as Ethernet or packet radio, in a communication network. The data that these messages contain may be delivered ov ...

, less interference, and lower latency while using the host CPU. Although it can be used as a traditional networking system, Myrinet is often used directly by programs that "know" about it, thereby bypassing a call into the

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

. Myrinet physically consists of two fibre optic cables, upstream and downstream, connected to the host computers with a single connector. Machines are connected via low-overhead routers and

switch In electrical engineering, a switch is an electrical component that can disconnect or connect the conducting path in an electrical circuit, interrupting the electric current or diverting it from one conductor to another. The most common type of ...

es, as opposed to connecting one machine directly to another. Myrinet includes a number of fault-tolerance features, mostly backed by the switches. These include flow control, error control, and "heartbeat" monitoring on every link. The "fourth-generation" Myrinet, called Myri-10G, supported a 10 Gbit/s data rate and can use 10 Gigabit Ethernet on

PHY PHY is an abbreviation for the physical layer of the OSI model and refers to the circuitry required to implement physical layer functions. PHY or Phy may also refer to: * Phy, the drug methadone * Phetchabun Airport (IATA code), Thailand See ...

, the physical layer (cables, connectors, distances, signaling). Myri-10G started shipping at the end of 2005. Myrinet was approved in 1998 by the

American National Standards Institute The American National Standards Institute (ANSI ) is a private non-profit organization that oversees the development of voluntary consensus standards for products, services, processes, systems, and personnel in the United States. The organi ...

for use on the

VMEbus VMEbus (Versa Module Europa or Versa Module Eurocard bus) is a computer bus standard, originally developed for the Motorola 68000 line of CPUs, but later widely used for many applications and standardized by the IEC as ANSI/IEEE 1014-1987. I ...

as ANSI/VITA 26-1998. One of the earliest publications on Myrinet is a 1995 IEEE article.

Performance

Myrinet is a lightweight protocol with little overhead that allows it to operate with throughput close to the basic signaling speed of the physical layer. For supercomputing, the low latency of Myrinet is even more important than its throughput performance, since, according to

Amdahl's law In computer architecture, Amdahl's law (or Amdahl's argument) is a formula which gives the theoretical speedup in latency of the execution of a task at fixed workload that can be expected of a system whose resources are improved. It states tha ...

, a high-performance parallel system tends to be bottlenecked by its slowest sequential process, which in all but the most

embarrassingly parallel In parallel computing, an embarrassingly parallel workload or problem (also called embarrassingly parallelizable, perfectly parallel, delightfully parallel or pleasingly parallel) is one where little or no effort is needed to separate the problem ...

supercomputer workloads is often the latency of message transmission across the network.

Deployment

According to Myricom, 141 (28.2%) of the June 2005

TOP500 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computing, distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these ...

supercomputers used Myrinet technology. In the November 2005 TOP500, the number of supercomputers using Myrinet was down to 101 computers, or 20.2%, in November 2006, 79 (15.8%), and by November 2007, 18 (3.6%), a long way behind

gigabit Ethernet In computer networking, Gigabit Ethernet (GbE or 1 GigE) is the term applied to transmitting Ethernet frames at a rate of a gigabit per second. The most popular variant, 1000BASE-T, is defined by the IEEE 802.3ab standard. It came into use i ...

at 54% and

InfiniBand InfiniBand (IB) is a computer networking communications standard used in high-performance computing that features very high throughput and very low latency. It is used for data interconnect both among and within computers. InfiniBand is also use ...

at 24.2%. In the June 2014 TOP500 list, the number of supercomputers using Myrinet interconnect was 1 (0.2%). In November, 2013, the assets of Myricom (including the Myrinet technology) were acquired by CSP Inc. In 2016, it was reported that

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

had also offered to buy the company.

References

External links

* {{webarchive , url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130816035225/http://www.myricom.com/ , date=August 16, 2013 , title=Myrinet site
CSPI
current owner or Myrinet. Supercomputing Computer networks

Description

Performance

Deployment

See also

References

External links