Evaluation of distributed communication systems

  • Authors:
  • Ian Parsons

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Alberta

  • Venue:
  • CASCON '93 Proceedings of the 1993 conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative research: distributed computing - Volume 2
  • Year:
  • 1993

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Abstract

Selecting a distributed communication system is a balancing act. Ease of use, efficiency of the final product, and future needs are not mutually exclusive considerations. Several questions spring to mind immediately. What are the requirements of the communication system? What is available to use? What are the requirements of the user ? Software engineers desire software to have clean interfaces and to make any internal details inaccessible to the other components. Performance users want the software to be scalable, efficient, and easy to use, read, and debug. This paper examines four communication systems (ISIS, NMP, PVM, and Concert/C) from these two points of view.Several programs designed to test the performance of the communication system are used as examples for comparing features. These programs are neither definitive test programs nor do they have complicated communication structures. Rather, they are used to highlight potential problem areas and implementation differences.All four of these communication systems are being evaluated for the Enterprise project. Enterprise is a programming environment for developing and running distributed parallel programs on a network of workstations. Enterprise, using templates and a precompiler, constructs a software layer around the application. The user is shielded from the tiresome low-level details of hand crafting the distributed communication portion of the application. Other software tools within Enterprise manage and monitor the distributed program.For two of the communication systems (ISIS and NMP) the code was created using Enterprise. The other two systems (PVM and Concert/C) are compared using handcrafted code. A comparision between the Enterprise code and handcrafted code is done using NMP.