Performance evaluation of network programming environments

Benchmark tests of distributed/parallel software systems such as EXPRESS, ISIS, LINDA, PVM, and TCGMSG programming environments on a system of IBM/RS6000 520 workstations connected via a 16-Mb token ring network are presented. The authors compare message passing times as a function of the size of a message, and execution times of two applications. The applications, the Monte Carlo simulation and Jacobi iterative algorithms, were selected from TCGMSG as test cases to compare the scalability and the overhead of each package in terms of the performance. The results indicate that packages using the TCP/IP network protocol enjoy better performance than those using the UDP/IP network protocol, although UDP/IP is faster than TCP/IP in terms of transfer rates. Also, those packages using indirect communication have more overhead than those using direct communication. The porting experiences strongly indicate that library support for global operations is very useful in a distributed/parallel environment