A requirement analysis for high performance distributed computing over LANs

With the proliferation of high performance workstations and the current trend towards high speed communication networks. the cumulative computing power provided by a group of general purpose workstations is comparable to supercomputers. However a number of obstacles have to be overcome before the full potential of these network-based distributed systems can be exploited. This paper investigates the requirements of current workstation clusters interconnected by local area networks (LANs) which would allow them to be used as platforms for high performance distributed computing. The blocked LU decomposition of dense matrices is used as the running example in the presented study. Performance of this algorithm is measured on the iPSC/860 hypercube and on a set of homogeneous workstations (SUN SPARCstation 1+) interconnected by Ethernet. These measures are analyzed and a set of requirements are identified which would enable a network of workstations to deliver high performance distributed computing