Task 1 Overview ( Fibre Channel Benchmark)

Introduction

This report presents results from a study of the communication performance measured when sending date between two Indigo2 Silicon Graphics workstation s via an N_port Ancor Fiber card over an optical fabric. Three benchmarking programs were utilized to conduct the necessary performance measurements. Measurements were taken using both the TCP/IP and UDP/IP protocols.
The fibre channel performance was measured using TTCP and Netperf communication benchmark programs. In addition, the performance of the fibre channel cards was measured under Direct Channel using the WrtieDC/ReadDC programs. These benchmark programs were all publicly available by ftp to sgi.com/src.
The communication performance was obtained by sending a series of message size (1k-64k) in different socket buffer size to the destination machine. The throughput obtained was recorded and graphically represented.

Test Configuration

Performance measurements are obtained between two indigo 2 Silicon Graphics workstations. Each has a 200 Mhz MPS R4400 processor and 128MB of memory.
The EISA Communications Interface Module(CIM) 250 is an N_Port adapter for a Fibre channel compliant network. A point-to-point topoly was used in these experiments.
The data transfer rate on the fibre channel card is about 25MB/sec (25600 KB/sec). The maximum packet size supported by fibre channel is 65536 bytes, while the minimum packet size is 1 byte.

Fibre Channel vs Ethernet

This figure shows the throughput obtained when using socket buffer size of 8K, 16K, 32K and 64K using the TCP/IP protocol in both Fibre Channel and Ethernet network. A maximum throughput of 4800 KB/sec was obtained using those test date.
The maximum throught of 12500 KB/sec when using the direct channel interface about 50% of the fibre channel data rate.