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

集群已经成为设计高性能和可靠数据中心的最具成本效益的解决方案，越来越多地部署到各种基于web的服务中。然而，数据中心造成了总体延迟的很大一部分，随着动态Web内容使用的增加，这种延迟可能会增加。此外，（24x7）服务器对托管关键服务的可用性似乎是一个牵强的目标。因此，设计高性能、可靠的数据中心已成为一个关键问题。本研究的目的是研究一个三层数据中心的设计，该数据中心由前端Web服务器、中间层应用服务器和后端数据库服务器组成，使用行业标准InfiniBand架构（IBA）通信范式。原型数据中心将在96个节点的iba连接的Linux集群上实现，使用实际应用程序和基准测试调查三个研究问题。这些问题是量化使用用户级通信技术（如IBA）而不是标准TCP/IP堆栈的性能优势，为数据中心提出新的性能增强技术，以及描述不同故障对服务器可靠性的影响。该研究将能够有效地利用IBA通信机制来设计多层数据中心，量化使用IBA的端到端性能优势，为高可用性数据中心开发容错机制，并理解高性能和可靠性之间的设计权衡。除了在数据中心设计的几个领域培养新的研究方向外，这项研究的结果可能具有重大的商业利益。

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.