Super Servers: Commodity Computer Clusters Pose a Software Challenge

Technology is pushing the fastest processors onto single mass-produced chips. Standards are defining a new level of integration: the Pizza Box – a one board computer with memory, disk, baseware, and middleware. These developments fundamentally change the way we will build computers. Future designs must leverage commodity products. Clusters of computers are the natural way to build future mainframes. A simple analysis suggests that such machines will have thousands of processors giving a tera-op processing rate, terabytes of RAM storage, many terabytes of disc storage, and terabits-per-second of communications bandwidth. This presages 4T clusters. To an iron monger or software house: the T stands for Terror! To customers it stands for Tremendous! These computers will be ideally suited to be super-servers in future networks. Software that extracts parallelism from applications is the key to making clusters useful. Client-server computing has natural parallelism: many clients submit many independent requests that can be processed in parallel. Database, visualization, and scientific computing applications have also made great strides in extracting and exploiting parallelism within a single application. These promising first steps bode well for cluster architectures. The challenge remains to extend these techniques to general purpose systems. Outline: Introduction Standards Are Coming! Business Strategy In An Era Of Commodity Software. System Integration And Service In A Commodity World 4B Machines: Smoking-Hairy Golfballs. Future Mainframes: 4T Machines. Who needs a 4T super-server? What Are The Key Properties Of Super-Servers? Clusters and Cluster Softwarethe key to 4T machines. Cluster Software – Is It a Commodity Business? Standards: Tell Me It Isn't SO (Snake Oil). Clusters versus Distributed Systems, What's The Difference?