Distributed computing applications rely on transmissions of messages between processes. however, as workstations are not intended to manage this kind of communications, it is necessary to use some communications tools known as Message Passing libraries. In addition, the need for interoperability among the rapidly proliferating number of hardwares and softwares led to the definition of CORBA, which standardizes the execution support of distributed object applications. This architecture offers a good interoperability and encapsulation support. Moreover, its method invocation mechanism, offers several features and can be usedas a good communication model. consequently, the use of such architecture for ditributed and grid computing applications seems interesting and promising. However, CORBA is always criticised on the performance level. By taking account of all these elemnets, a performance evaluation of CORBA seems necessary. the topic of this paper is to present ouir benchmark results of some CORBA implementations (ORBacus and TAO) and to compare them whith those of the two message passing libraries MPI (MPICH and LAM) and PVM, by using a Network of Workstations (NOW)