Building a Scalable Digital Learning System on Server Clusters

This paper presents a scalable digital learning system that can store and provide Web access to digital contents from voluntaries, teachers, and institutions that lack resources or expertise to offer classes over the Internet. We use the server-cluster architecture as a way to create scalable and highly available solutions. However, hosting a variety of contents from different owners on such a distributed server system faces new design and management problems and requires new solutions. This paper describes the research work we are pursuing to construct a system that address the challenges faced by hosting learning content on a server farm environment. We also report performance data measured from such a production learning site.