Performance evaluation of communication software systems for distributed computing

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in object-oriented distributed computing since it is better equipped to deal with complex systems while providing extensibility, maintainability and reusability. At the same time, several new high-speed network technologies have emerged for local- and wide-area networks. However, the performance of networking software is not improving as fast as that of the networking hardware and the workstation microprocessors. This paper gives an overview and evaluates the performance of the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) standard in a distributed computing environment at NASA Ames Research Center. The environment consists of two testbeds of SGI workstations connected by four networks: Ethernet, FDDI, HiPPI and ATM. The performance results for three communication software systems are presented, analyzed and compared. These systems are: BSD socket programming interface, IONA's Orbix, an implementation of the CORBA specification, and the PVM message-passing library. The results show that high-level communication interfaces, such as CORBA and PVM, can achieve reasonable performance under certain conditions.