Super-Servers: Commodity Computer Clusters Pose a Software Challenge [chapter]

Jim Gray
1995 Informatik aktuell  
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
more » ... rocessing 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.
doi:10.1007/978-3-642-79646-3_2 dblp:conf/btw/Gray95 fatcat:qvgd7w5uq5awni4ehi57of4lci