Three micro-VAX processors are being acquired to be used both for pure simulation/emulation and for an active distributed database systems testbed. These machines are placed in a Dedicated Distributed Processing Lab and are networked together. Computer engineering research at this facility broadly falls into two categories, distributed computer systems and design of VLSI architectures. Work in distributed computer systems supported by this equipment includes efforts in: understanding the effects that different parameters and components have on the performance of distributed database systems; the design and evaluation of scheduling algorithms for distributed computer systems; and the design and evaluation of channel access protocols for local area networks.
