Large grained parallel processing on workstation networks

Computing environments consisting of powerful workstations on high-speed LANs provide the potential for large grained parallel processing at low cost. A framework to enable this has been constructed on an Ethernet local area network of Sun workstations. Both message passing and shared memory paradigms are supported, and existing, well understood, procedural languages are used to program the system. Initial experiences with the system have been encouraging and performance comparable to that on commercial multiprocessors has been achieved for some classes of applications.>