Research on cluster of workstations

Cluster of Workstations is becoming an important kind of parallel computing platform. Two issues are essential for promoting the popularization of COW: high-performance communication mechanism and powerful programming environment. In this paper we present our research work on COW, which aims at giving a practical solution to the above issues. In order to build a high performance communication system, we design a reduced communication protocol in addition to making use of high-speed network hardware. Based on PVM, we implement a practical programming environment which include parallel compiling systems, parallel debugger, load balancing tool and execution fault recovery tool. Some performance results are given in this paper