Automatic management of CPU and I/O bottlenecks in distributed applications on ATM networks

Existing parallel programming environments for networks of workstations improve the performance of computationally intensive applications by using message passing or virtual shared memory to alleviate CPU bottlenecks. This paper describes an approach based on message passing that addresses both CPU and I/O bottlenecks for a specific class of distributed applications on ATM networks. ATM provides the bandwidth required to utilize multiple I/O channels in parallel. This paper also describes an environment based on distributed process management and centralized application management that implements the approach. The environment adds processes to a running application when necessary to alleviate CPU and I/O bottlenecks while managing process connections in a manner that is transparent to the application.