Performance evaluation of ATM and gigabit networks

The explosive growth of the Internet and the emergence of bandwidth-hungry applications have made asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) and gigabit Ethernet suitable network technologies to interconnect the machines and to implement high-performance distributed computing applications. We compare and characterize the performance of ATM and gigabit Ethernet over two computing platforms: Windows NT and Linux operating system. We use the NetPIPE utility developed at Ames Laboratory to compare the performance of one-way transmission (stream transfer) and roundtrip transmission (block transfer). We evaluated two parallel/distributed computing applications using the MPI message passing tool.