> [...] > > >From an adoption perspective, though, the ability to shine in > micro-benchmarks is important, even if it means using an ad-hoc tuning. > There is some justification for it after all. There are small clusters > out there (many more than big ones, in fact) so taking maximum advantage > of a small scale is relevant.
I'm obliged to point out that you jumped to a conclusion -- possibly true in some cases, but not always. You assumed that a performance increase for a two-node micro-benchmark would result in an application performance increase for a small cluster. Using RDMA for short messages is the default on small clusters *because* of the two-node micro-benchmark, not because the cluster is small. I've seen plenty of cases where doing the scalable thing, rather than the optimized for micro-benchmarks thing, leads to increases in application performance even at a small scale. -Ron
