PVM COMMUNICATION PERFORMANCE OVER AN ATM MAN

This paper presents results of the performance tests of the PVM system over an ATM Metropolitan Area Network (MAN). PVM (Parallel Virtual Ma chine) is a communication package, which is considered currently a de facto standard for the development of high-performance distributed app lications. ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) is the emerging cell-switc hing technology for high-speed networks. This work is part of the expe riments of heterogeneous network computing in the framework of the Nea net Project. Neanet is one of the first public high-speed networks bas ed on ATM. The ultimate goal of the experiments is to assess the effec tiveness of ATM geographical networks for high-performance computing. Besides allowing comparison with local area networks, the PVM performa nce figures are useful per se in the design and in the predictive perf ormance evaluation of distributed applications on ATM networks.