Distributed Filesystem for a Cluster of PCs with Myrinet
Andreas Fleuti
Diploma Thesis Summer 2000
Supervisors: Felix Rauch, Prof. T. Stricker
Institute for Computer Systems, ETH Zürich
Objectives
In this work, an existing prototype of a driver was extended. This new
driver allows a distributed access on remote primary or secondary memory,
using the Myrinet Network. Accessing these remote secondary memories in
parallel allows a high throughput.
The Myrinet Network used in this work achieves a throughput up to 1.28 GBit/s.
Each Myrinet Network card has a programmable RISC processor and three independent
DMA's. This releases the main processor.
In a first step, the existing prototype was analyzed, completely redesigned
and the none existing access to secondary memory was implemented. The main
focus was throughput and scalability.
Results
In a second step, the new features of the prototype was compared to the
achievements of the older prototypes. The new prototype has a significantly
higher throughput but it doesn't scale well. There are two bottlenecks,
interrupt handling and the Buffer-Cache-system of the Linux Kernel, both
limiting the system throughput, but the second one is normally dominant.
For both bottlenecks, there must be an indirection in order to improve
throughput and scalability. This could be done in a continuing work.
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ETH Zürich: Institute of Computer Science
Comments to Felix Rauch <rauch@inf.ethz.ch>
Date 3.8.2000