In search of clusters: the coming battle in lowly parallel computing
Gregory F. Pfister · Prentice-Hall, Inc eBooks · 1995
I. WHAT IS A CLUSTER, AND WHY USE THEM? 1. Introduction. Working Harder. Working Smarter. Getting Help. A Neglected Paradigm. What Is To Come. 2. Examples. The Farm. Fermilab. Many Others. Cluster System Products. Cluster Software Products. Availability Clusters. Not the End. 3. Why Clusters? The Standard Litany. Why Now? Why Not Now? Cluster Enablers. 4. Definition, Distinctions, and Initial Comparisons. Definition. Distinction From Parallel Systems. Distinctions from Distributed Systems. Concerning System Other Comparisons. Reactions. II. HARDWARE. 5. A Cluster Bestiary. Exposed vs. Enclosed. Glass-House vs. Campus-Wide Cluster Hardware Structures. Communication Requirements. 6. Symmetric Multiprocessors. What Is an SMP? What Is a Cache, and Why Is It Necessary? Memory Contention. Cache Coherence. Sequential and Other Consistencies. Input/Output. Summary. III. SOFTWARE. 7. Workloads. Why Discuss Workloads? Serial: Throughput. Parallel. Amdahl's Law. The Point of All This. 8. Basic Programming Models and Issues. What Is a Programming Model? The Sample Problem. Uniprocessor. Shared Memory. Message-Passing. Both at Once. SIMD and All That. Importance. 9. Commercial Programming Models. Small N vs. Large N. Small-N Programming Models. Large-N I/O Programming Models. Large-N Processor-Memory Models. Shared Disk or not Shared Disk? Small N vs. Large N in Commercial Subsystems. 10. Single System Image. Single-System-Image Boundaries. Single-System-Image Levels. The Application and Subsystem Levels. The Operating System Kernel Levels. Hardware Levels. SSI and System Management. IV. SYSTEMS. 11. Symmetric Multiprocessors vs. Clusters. What's Being Compared? Conventional Wisdom. SMP and Other Scaling. SMP-Cluster Performance Comparisons. Other Comparisons. Conclusions? 12. Why We Need the Concept of Cluster. Benchmarks. Development Directions. Confusion of Issues. The Lure of Large Numbers. 13. Conclusion. Cluster Operating Systems. Communication Overhead. Standards. Software Pricing. Coda: The End of Parallel Computer Architecture. Annotated Bibliography. Index. About the Author.