Communication Performance of Installed Networks of Workstations for Parallel Processing

摘要

Heterogeneity and communication performance are between the most challenging characteristics of installed networks of workstations used for parallel processing. As the evolution shows, most of the local area networks tend to upgrade its global processing power (by upgrading and/or adding workstations) and maintaining its communication hardware performance. From the point of view of parallel processing, application granularity is strongly affected by the relationship of hardware computing and data communication performance. More precisely, the whole application performance will become unacceptable when the wrong granularity is chosen. A sequence as well as a methodology of communication performance assessment tools are explained in this paper. They cover the topic from the parallel application point of view which has to use at least a library of routines that makes it possible parallel processing on networks of workstations. Also, a real LAN is measured and current performance values are given.