Evaluation of distributed communication systems
Ian Parsons · 1993
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 ...