To extend the widespread use of the high performance parallel interface (HIPPI) as a networking solution for high-speed communications, the 25-meter distance limitation must be solved. Three options available for alleviating the problem of distance limitation are serial-HIPPI, HIPPI/SONET mapping or HIPPI-ATM mapping, and IP routing. Serial-HIPPI, HIPPI/SONET mapping and HIPPI-ATM mapping provide extended HIPPI connectivities at the physical layer, while IP routing forwards data between the HIPPI networks and other networks at the network layer. We study two feasible solutions of this problem, HIPPI tunneling (HIPPI-ATM mapping) and IP routing. We compare these two schemes in terms of network connectivities, protocol overhead, and flow control. The performance evaluation of one implementation of HIPPI tunneling and IP routing is presented. The experimental performance suggests that a high degree of bandwidth utilization was achieved by both HIPPI tunneling and IP routing in this implementation.

Communication between processors has long been the bottleneck of distributed network computing. However, recent progress in switch-based high-speed local area networks (LANs) may be changing this situation. Asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) is one of the most widely-accepted and emerging high-speed network standards which can potentially satisfy the communication needs of distributed network computing. We investigate distributed network computing over local ATM networks. We first study the performance characteristics involving end-to-end communication in an environment that includes several types of workstations interconnected via a Fore Systems' ASX-100 ATM switch. We then compare the communication performance of four different application programming interfaces (APIs). The four APIs were Fore Systems' ATM API, the BSD socket programming interface, Sun's remote procedure call (RPC), and the parallel virtual machine (PVM) message passing library. Each API represents distributed programming at a different communication protocol layer. We evaluated two popular distributed applications, parallel matrix multiplication and parallel partial differential equations, over the local ATM network. The experimental results show that network computing is promising over local ATM networks, provided that the higher level protocols, device drivers, and network interfaces are improved.>

Communication between processors has long been the bottleneck of distributed network computing. However recent progress in switch-based high-speed local area networks (LANs) may be changing the situation. Asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) is one of the most widely-accepted and emerging high-speed network standards which can potentially satisfy the communication needs of distributed network computing. We investigate distributed network computing over local ATM networks. We first study the performance characteristics involving end-to-end communication in an environment that includes several types of workstations interconnected via a Fore Systems' ASX-100 ATM Switch. We then compare the communication performance of four different application programming interfaces (APIs). The four APIs were Fore Systems ATM API, BSD socket programming interface, Sun's Remote Procedure Call (RPC), and the Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) message passing library. Each API represents distributed programming at a different communication protocol layer. We evaluate parallel matrix multiplication over the local ATM network. The experimental results show that network computing is promising over local ATM networks.>