A Cost-Effective, High Bandwidth Server I/O network Architecture for Cluster Systems

In this paper we present a cost-effective, high bandwidth server I/O network architecture, named PaScal (Parallel and Scalable). We use the PaScal server I/O network to support data-intensive scientific applications running on very large-scale Linux clusters. PaScal server I/O network architecture provides (1) bi-level data transfer network by combining high speed interconnects for computing inter-process communication (IPC) requirements and low-cost gigabit Ethernet interconnect for global IP based storage/file access, (2) bandwidth on demand I/O network architecture without re-wiring and reconfiguring the system, (3) multi-path routing scheme, (4) reliability improvement through reducing large number of network components in server I/O network, and (5) global storage/file systems support in heterogeneous multi-cluster and grids environments. We have compared the PaScal server I/O network architecture with the federated server I/O network architecture (FESIO). Concurrent MPI-I/O performance testing results and deployment cost comparison demonstrate that the PaScal server I/O network architecture can outperform the FESIO network architecture in many categories: cost-effectiveness, scalability, and manageability and ease of large-scale I/O network.