A Framework for Developing and Experimenting with Parallel Process Architectures to Support High-Performance Transport Systems

Multi-processing is a promising technique for improving the performance, scalability, and cost effectiveness of communication subsystems. Improving performance is becoming increasingly important to alleviate bottlenecks resulting from network transmission speeds that now often exceed the processing capacity of end-systems. This paper describes a modular framework for developing and experimenting with process architectures for bus-oriented, shared memory multiprocessors. A process architecture binds units of communication protocol processing (such as layers, functions, connections, and messages) with one or more processing elements. This paper describes several alternative process architectures supported by ADAPTIVE and outlines techniques used to perform controlled experimentation with these alter-