title: MPI or Sockets?
body: <p>I'm working on a loosely coupled cluster for some data processing. The network code and processing code is in place, but we are evaluating different methodologies in our approach. Right now, as we should be, we are I/O bound on performance issues, and we're trying to decrease that bottleneck. Obviously, faster switches like Infiniband would be awesome, but we can't afford the luxury of just throwing out what we have and getting new equipment.</p>
  
  <p>My question posed is this. All traditional and serious HPC applications done on clusters is typically implemented with message passing versus sending over sockets directly. What are the performance benefits to this? Should we see a speedup if we switched from sockets? </p>