In this work we describe a series of performance tests on different architectures of high bandwidth local area networks, contemporarily in use at C.I.L.E.A. (Inter-University Consortium for Automatic Elaboration of Lombardy) to connect multi-processor machines devoted to educational and research purposes, such as fluido-dynamic and mechanical simulations. This LAN is essentially made out of a standard FDDI ring, and an HyperFabric backbone. HyperFabric is a Hewlett-Packard high performance network system bus, with a declared maximum bandwidth of 2.5 Gbit/s full duplex per link. We present a comparison, in terms of effective bandwidth, average throughput and CPU consumption of the above mentioned network systems. Furthermore we also describe the effects, in terms of transfer efficiency, of such a mixed environment, in which different systems co-exist and must often be cross-walked by various applications, as backups and mass storage access. Measurements and comparisons are made using Open Software tools like netperf and HetPIPE.
A comparison of multi-carrier OFDM and single carrier iterative equalisation for future high performance wireless local area networks
