CSR--PDOS: Exploring Cluster-Based Data Center Design Space for High Performance and Dependability

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Clusters have emerged as the most cost-effective solution todesign high performance and dependable data centers,which are increasingly being deployed for a wide variety of Web-based services.However, data centers contribute to a significant part of theoverall delay, which is likely to grow with the increasing useof dynamic Web contents. Furthermore, (24x7) server availabilityto host critical services appears to be a far-fetched objective. Therefore, design of high performance and dependable data centershas become a critical issue.The objective of this research is to investigate the design of a three-tierdata center consisting of a front-end Web server, a middle-tier applicationserver, and a back-end database server using the industry standard, InfiniBand Architecture (IBA) communication paradigm.A prototype data center will be implemented on a 96-nodeIBA-connected Linux cluster to investigate three research issuesusing real applications and benchmarks. The issues are quantifying the performance benefits ofusing a user-level communication technique such as IBA instead ofthe standard TCP/IP stack, proposing new performance enhancementtechniques for data centers, and characterizing the impact of differentfaults on server dependability.The research will enable effectively utilizing the IBA communication mechanismfor designing multi-tier data centers, quantifying the end-to-end performancebenefits of using IBA, developing fault-tolerant mechanisms for highly availabledata centers, and understanding the design tradeoffs between high performanceand dependability.In addition to fostering new research directions inseveral areas of data center design, the outcome of this researchis likely to have significant commercial interests.