Integrating New Capabilities into NetPIPE

The performance of the communication network can greatly affect the ability of scientific applications to make efficient use of the computational power available in high-performance computing systems. Many tools exist for analyzing network performance, but most concentrate on a single layer in the communication subsystem or on one type of network hardware. NetPIPE was developed to provide a complete and consistent set of analytical tools in a flexible framework that can be applied to analyze the message-passing libraries and the native software layers that they run on. Examples are given on how NetPIPE is being enhanced to enable research in channel bonding multiple Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, to analyze InfiniBand hardware and the MPI libraries being developed for it, and to optimize memory copy routines to make SMP message-passing more efficient.