Parallel Communications: An Experimental Study
Karel Malý, Sanjay Khanna, Edwin C. Foudriat, C. Michael Overstreet, Ravi Mukkamala, Muhammad Zubair, Ramesh Yerraballi, D. Sudheer · 1993
We present performance results from tests conducted on a modern workstation when it is connected to a network with parallel channels. The purpose is to determine the maximum throughput which can be delivered to a single application. We also conducted an analysis to identify precisely where networking bottlenecks exist in the hardware architecture and operating system used in this workstation. This analysis indicates that this workstation (a Sun Sparc 1) is capable of a maximum speed of 8.8 Mbps using TCP/IP. This analysis was then validated through experimentation. Using a prototype implementation of TCP/IP in which IPwas modi ed to send and receive packets on two Ethernets, we were able to deliver 8.1 Mbps to a single application if the two Ethernets were lightly loaded (up to 2 Mbps background tra c) and almost maintain this level until both networks saturated with the combination of background tra c and the tra c from the parallel application: 7.2 Mbps to this single application with background tra c of 4.5 Mbps on each net. This prototype demonstrates that a single workstation cannot attain maximum throughput (constrained by the workstation architecture) in presence of other machines on an Ethernet. A simple expedient of adding a second Ethernet connection to a workstation and replacing IP with our parallel prototype code can provide high data rates to a single application until both nets are saturated.