A Simulated Testbed for Workstation Clusters over ATM Networks

The present work illustrates the architecture and utilization of a simulated ATM testbed, which enables studies of ATM-based workstation networks to be carried over another network technology, like Ethernet. The current testbed models a very simple ATM network (applications lay directly over AAL), but it allows an easy addition of protocol layers in order to evaluate their impact on the performance of the whole system. In particular, we have measured the communication latency and the global performance achieved by the ATM model and have compared them with the performance of both an Ethernet-based workstation cluster and a supercomputer. 1 Introduction Up to now, high performance computing has been exploited mostly by vector and massively parallel supercomputers. As these systems have rather a low price-to-performance ratio, the search of alternative approaches has become a matter of interest. The most promising proposal is the use of networked workstations, since the rapid improvement..