Characterizing Communication Interactions of Parallel and Sequential Jobs on ATM Networks of Workstations

In this paper, we examine and characterize effects of communication interactions of parallel and sequential jobs on a nondedicated ATM network of workstations. We quantitatively model the interaction process and measure communication delays of parallel jobs caused by the interaction. In addition, a scheme is proposed to distinguish and prioritize the two types of communications messages to reduce the disturbance of sequential jobs' communications on the communication performance of parallel jobs. Measurement and simulation results on an ATM network of workstations support our analytical models and the scheme. Keywords: Communication, networks of workstations (NOW), parallel processing, TCP/IP. 1 Introduction The wide availability of workstations and improving speed of networks have made networks of workstations (NOWs) become important platforms for parallel computation. The network used by NOW is usually a general purpose network. To address the communication issue on NOW, cur..