EXPERIENCES WITH ATM IN A MULTIVENDOR PILOT SYSTEM AT FORSCHUNGSZENTRUM-JULICH

The ATM technology for highspeed serial transmission provides a new qu ality of communication by introducing novel features in a LAN environm ent, especially support of real time communication, of both LAN and WA N communication and of multimedia streams. In order to evaluate ATM fo r future DAQ systems and remote control systems as well as for a high speed picture archiving and communications system for medical images, Forschungszentrum Julich has build up a pilot system for the evaluatio n of ATM and standard low cost multimedia systems. It is a heterogeneo us multivendor system containing a variety of switches and desktop sol utions, employing different protocol options of ATM. The tests conduct ed in the pilot system revealed major difficulties regarding stability , interoperability and performance. The paper presents motivations, la yout and results of the pilot system. Discussion of results concentrat es on performance issues relevant for realistic applications, e.g. con nection to a RAID system via NFS over ATM.