Enabling Wide Area Single System Image Experimentation on the GENI Platform

The Single System Image (SSI) clustering technology hides the distributed nature of the participating resources, and makes them appear as a single homogeneous computing resource to the user. An SSI cluster can utilize all the available processing power and memory from its participating resources. However, using the current implementations, an SSI can only be formed using nodes which are within one-hop distance of each other. This implies that nodes have to be within the same broadcast domain / Local Area Network (LAN) in order to participate in an SSI cluster. This limits the full potential of SSIs. In this research, we propose enhancements to the existing SSI technology to overcome the one-hop limitation, thus enabling nodes over a WAN to form SSI clusters. GENI provides a perfect platform for such experimentation. In this paper, we report our initial success in enabling Transparent Interprocess Communication Protocol (TIPC) over wide area nodes in GENI and progress in backporting the TIPC 2.0 protocol, with support for communication over WANs, to Kerrighed, an open-source software for creating SSIs.