High Performance Distributed Computing over ATM Networks: State of the Art

The goal of this paper is to discuss the current trends on High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC) environments supported by ATM networks. The adoption of a high speed network like ATM to overcome the bandwidth limitation induced by traditional LAN technologies has moved the bottleneck to the host. The challenge of ATM-based HPDC systems is to minimize the latency inherent to networking so that the aggregate performance be as close as possible to that of supercomputers. Since ATM will become the predominant networking technology in LANs and WANS, the achievement of this objective will approach high performance computing to a greater number of users. For this purpose, as far as the protocol structure is concerned three directions are being considered: (i) replacing the network technology by ATM, leaving the rest unchanged, (ii) removing transport protocols and making applications and user-level libraries provide the HPDC-specific transport-level functions that ATM currently lacks,..