DISTRIBUTED NETWORK COMPUTING OVER LOCAL ATM NETWORKS

Communication between processors has long been the bottleneck of distr ibuted network computing. However, recent progress in switch-based hig h-speed local area networks (LAN's) may be changing this situation, As ynchronous transfer mode (ATM) is one of the most widely-accepted and emerging high-speed network standards which can potentially satisfy th e communication needs of distributed network computing, In this paper, we investigate distributed network computing over local ATM networks, We first study the performance characteristics involving end-to-end c ommunication in an environment that includes several types of workstat ions interconnected via a Fore Systems' ASX-100 ATM Switch, We then co mpare the communication performance of four different application prog ramming interfaces (API's), The four API's were Fore Systems' ATM API, the BSD socket programming interface, Sun's remote procedure call (RP C), and the parallel virtual machine (PVM) message passing library, Ea ch API represents distributed programming at a different communication protocol layer, We evaluated two popular distributed applications, pa rallel matrix multiplication and parallel partial differential equatio ns, over the local ATM network, The experimental results show that net work computing is promising over local ATM networks, provided that the higher level protocols, device drivers, and network interfaces are im proved.