PVM Parameter Tuning to Improve Communication in Distributed Applications

This paper presents experimental results of an investigation to efficiently exploit PVM communication on Network of Workstations (NoW) over ATM networks. Test results show that a better exploitation of ATM LAN bandwidth can be gained by tuning few parameters, both at PVM application program interface and PVM implementation level, such as PVM packet fragment size and TCP socket buffer size. Parameter tuning gave good communication performances compared with other PVM implementation that directly use the ATM Adaptation Layer instead of TCP/IP. It is foreseen that, on developing PVM distributed applications, better communication performances could be obtained through a careful network parameter setting