Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

One of the first questions that a user of a new Beowulf-type system asks is, "How fast does my system run?" Performance is more than just a curiosity for cluster systems. It is arguably the central motivation for building a clustered system in the first place -- a single node is not sufficient for the task at hand. thus the measurement of performance, and comparisons of performance between various available system designs and constructions, is of paramount importance.