Reliable cluster computing with a new checkpointing RAID-x architecture

Author

Hwang, Kai ; Jin, Hai ; Ho, Roy ; Ro, Wonwoo

Author_Institution

Internet & Cluster Comput. Lab., Univ. of Southern California, CA, USA

fYear

2000

fDate

2000

Firstpage

171

Lastpage

184

Abstract

In a serverless cluster of PCs or workstations, the cluster must allow remote file accesses or parallel I/O directly performed over disks distributed to all client nodes. We introduce a new distributed disk array, called the RAID-x, for use in serverless clusters. The RAID-x architecture is based on an orthogonal striping and mirroring (OSM) scheme, which exploits full-bandwidth and protects the system from all single disk failures. The performance of the RAID-x is experimentally proven superior to RAID-1 and NFS in the Linux cluster environment. We propose a new striped checkpointing scheme, leveraging on striped parallelism and pipelined writing of successive disk stripes. This RAID-x architecture greatly enhances the throughput, reliability, and availability of scalable clusters. It appeals especially to I/O-centric cluster applications

Keywords

RAID; fault tolerant computing; workstation clusters; I/O-centric cluster applications; Linux clusters; checkpointing RAID-x architecture; disk mirroring; distributed disk array; fault tolerance; orthogonal striping and mirroring; parallel I/O; pipelined writing; reliable cluster computing; remote file accesses; scalable clusters; serverless cluster of PCs; single system image; staggered writing; striped checkpointing scheme; striped parallelism; Checkpointing; Computer architecture; Concurrent computing; Distributed computing; File systems; Internet; Laboratories; Linux; Personal communication networks; Writing;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Heterogeneous Computing Workshop, 2000. (HCW 2000) Proceedings. 9th

Conference_Location

Cancun

ISSN

1097-5209

Print_ISBN

0-7695-0556-2

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/HCW.2000.843742

Filename

843742