Many high performance distributed applications require high network throughput but are able to achieve only a small fraction of the available bandwidth. A common cause of this problem is improperly tuned network settings. Tuning techniques, such as setting the correct TCP buffers and using parallel streams, are well known in the networking community, but outside the networking community they are infrequently applied. In this paper, we describe a tuning daemon that uses TCP instrumentation data from the Unix kernel to transparently tune TCP parameters for specified individual flows over designated paths. No modifications are required to the application, and the user does not need to understand network or TCP characteristics.

The performance of the Intel iPSC/860 hypercube and the Ncube 6400 hypercube are compared with earlier hypercubes from Intel and Ncube. Computation and communication performance for a number of low-level benchmarks are presented for the Intel iPSC/1, iPSC/2, and iPSC/860 and for the Ncube 3200 and 6400. File I/O performance of the iPSC/860 and Ncube 6400 are compared.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory installed a 32 processor Cray X1 in March, 2003, and will have a 256 processor system installed by October, 2003. In this paper we describe our initial evaluation of the X1 architecture, focusing on microbenchmarks, kernels, and application codes that highlight the performance characteristics of the X1 architecture and indicate how to use the system most efficiently.

Initial performance results and early experiences are reported for the Kendall Square Research multiprocessor. The basic architecture of the shared-memory multiprocessor is described, and computational and I/O uerformance is measured for both serial and parallel progra_ms. _xperiences in porting various applications are described.

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