Geographically distributed computing: ATM over the NASA ACTS satellite

This paper outlines some of the problems and the solutions developed to support geographically distributed computing via ATM. In particular applications developed with the parallel virtual machine (PVM) message passing library, communicating via ATM at OC3c speeds (155 Mbps) through the NASA ACTS satellite are considered. A primary goal of this work is to assess the suitability of an ATM-based network to support interprocess communication and remote file I/O systems for distributed computing. This paper restricts itself to the behavior of PVM in a large propagation delay environment.