PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT OF NETWORK PROTOCOLS AND PARALLEL PROGRAMMING TOOLS FOR DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING SYSTEMS

Current advances in processor technology, networking technology, and s oftware tools have made high-performance distributed computing over Lo cal Area Networks (LANs) a promising alternative to traditional parall el and vector supercomputers. In this paper, we analyze the performanc e of two widely used distributed computing software tools, Express and PVM, on clusters of SUN workstations connected by an Ethernet and clu sters of HP workstations connected by a Fiber Distributed Data Interfa ce (FDDI) ring. Our goal is to assess the potential and pin-point the weaknesses of the various factors that affect the performance of these distributed computing environments. The major factors that are invest igated in this paper are: networks, workstations, and distributed soft ware tools. Extensive timing experiments, including one-to-one communi cations, exchange operations, and broadcast operations, have been perf ormed in order to quantitatively determine the impact of these factors . Moreover, analytic models have been developed to analyze the behavio r of the network protocols employed by the LAN-based platforms as well as to estimate the communication overhead for the distributed computi ng software tools.