Cluster Computing Slides by Kale Law Cluster Computing

Cluster Computing Slides by: Kale Law

Cluster Computing Definition Uses Advantages Design Types of Clusters Connection Types Physical Cluster Interconnects Examples Sources

Definition A computer cluster is a group of linked computers, working together closely so that in many respects they form a single computer. The components of a cluster are commonly, but not always, connected to each other through fast local area networks. Clusters are usually deployed to improve performance and/or availability over that provided by a single computer, while typically being much more cost-effective than single computers of comparable speed or availability.

Uses Medicine / Biochemistry (molecular level simulations) Weather forecasting (ocean current simulation) Engineering problems (car crash simulation etc. ) Genetics Research (human genome project) Physics (Quantum simulations)

Advantages Supercomputers are expensive when measured using $/MFlops Workstations are cheap Supercomputers from workstations are cheap (but they may be hard to program) Commercial Of The Shelf (COTS) components May grow infinitely large If one processor fails then the rest survives

Design Which network to use? Which CPU architecture to use? Performance (FP) Price Which node architecture to use? Latency Bandwidth Price Performance: local and remote communication Price Space Considerations Cooling/ventilation Power required

Types of Clusters High Performance Clusters Load-leveling Clusters LVS; load-level tcp connections; Web pages and applications Storage Clusters Move processes around to borrow cycles (eg. Mosix) Web-Service Clusters Beowulf; 1000 nodes; parallel programs; MPI parallel filesystems; same view of data from each node Database Clusters Oracle Parallel Server;

Connection Types WAN LAN ’infinite distance’ Few kilometers SAN Few meters

Physical Cluster Interconnects Fast. Ether Gigabit Ether. Net 10 Gigabit Ether. Net ATM c. Lan Myrinet Memory Channel SCI Atoll Server. Net

Examples of cluster computing Beowulf Clusters Berkeley NOW NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, 1993 Readily available low cost components, low cost interconnects Best cost/performance ratio Used today Network Of Workstations Early example of cluster computing STFX cs sun cluster Sony Playstation 3 Protein gene sequencing

Sources Check out http: //www. eg. bucknell. edu/~hyde/tfcc/vol 1 no 1 -dialog. html for an interesting discussion on the topic http: //www. diku. dk/hjemmesider/ansatte/vinte r/CC/ Wikipedia