Experiences with ATM: the Boulder perspective

ATM interconnection of computers and supercomputers offers exciting prospects for building both LANs and WANs because of the expected economies of scale, wide penetration of ATM, and future scalability to higher bandwidths. The ATM trial discussed was developed in Boulder, Colorado by US WEST to determine the feasibility of using ATM for high-end computing applications. We describe the Boulder ATM trial and report performance measurements for three types of applications: communication between workstations, communication between supercomputers, and access rates from computers to mass storage. In each case we found that the ATM WAN provided an efficient and effective transport mechanism, and limiting bandwidth effects were invariably within the computers and mass storage systems.