Performance of the ISIS Distributed Computing Toolkit

Abstract

The Isis Toolkit is a programming environment for building process- group structured distributed software. The system is widely used in settings requiring high reliability, strong distributed consistency guarantees, and high speed communication. In this paper, we describe experimental studies of Isis performance. Our work explores the impact of hardware support for multicast performance, with a focus on flow control mechanisms. The use of hardware multicast in Isis has not been discussed elsewhere. One conclusion of the paper is that although is performance is limited primarily by flow control considerations, this type of hardware support can lead to significant performance improvements for certain communication patterns. A second conclusion was that the Isis flow-control problem is surprisingly difficult. More work in this area, and on the underlying operating system communications layer (UDP), could have significant impact on the system.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jun 22, 1994
Accession Number
ADA281705

Entities

People

  • Ken Birman
  • Timothy Clark

Organizations

  • Cornell University

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Algorithms
  • Application Software
  • Back Pressure
  • Communication Channels
  • Computer Programming
  • Computer Science
  • Computers
  • Computing System Architectures
  • Control Systems
  • Hypervelocity Flow
  • Lisp Programming Language
  • Local Area Networks
  • Network Protocols
  • Operating Systems
  • Packet Loss
  • Transport Protocols

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Computer Networking
  • Parallel and Distributed Computing.
  • Systems Analysis and Design