Evaluation of emerging high speed networks on Brazos software DSM system

One of the factors that can influence the performance of a DSM system is the efficiency of multipoint access on the interconnection network. This work presents an evaluation of the Brazos system, a software implemented distributed shared memory (DSM) system designed for x86 SMP nodes running Windows NT and that takes advantage of multicast communication, with regard to different configurations of the communication network: broadcast fast Ethernet, switched fast Ethernet and LANE-ATM. In this evaluation, although the bandwidth of the ATM is larger than the fast Ethernet, low performance using LANE-ATM was observed, compared to the Brazos system performance using broadcast or switched Fast Ethernet. It shows the importance of the communication subsystem and the necessity of improvements on aspects like multipoint access, which has been not much explored on networks like ATM.