Re: [Linux-cluster] Re: [cgl_discussion] Re: [dcl_discussion] Clustersummit materials

From: Jonathan Stanton
Date: Fri Aug 13 2004 - 10:58:19 EST


Hi,

I just joined the linux-cluster list after seeing a few of the messages
that were cross-posted to linux-kernel.

On Thu, Aug 12, 2004 at 03:59:10PM -0700, Steven Dake wrote:
> Lars
>
> Thanks for posting transis. I had a look at the examples and API. The
> API is of course different then openais and focused on client/server
> architecture.

If you havn't looked at it already, you might want to try out the Spread
group communication system.

http://www.spread.org/

It is, conceptually although not code-wise, a decendant of the Transis
work (and the Totem system from UCSB) and is relatively widely used as a
production quality group messaging system (Some apache modules use it
along with a number of large web-clusters, a few commercial clustered
storage systems, and a lot of custom replication apps). It is not under
GPL but is open-source under a bsd-style (but not exactly the same)
license.

Like transis it has a client-server architecture (and a simpler API).

> I tried a performance test by sending a 64k message, and then receiving
> it 10 times with two nodes. This operation takes about 5 seconds on my
> hardware which is 128k/sec. I was expecting more like 8-10MB/sec. Is
> there anything that can be done to improve the performance?

I would expect transis to definitely do better then 128k/s given tests we
ran a number of years ago, but on upto medium sized lan environments the
totem/spread protocols are generally faster with less cpu overhead. I know
Spread could get 80Mb/s a number of years ago. We recently re-ran a clean
set of benchmarks and wrote them up. You can find them at:

http://www.cnds.jhu.edu/pub/papers/cnds-2004-1.pdf

I admit some bias as I'm one of the lead developers of Spread, and we (the
developers) have been building group messaging systems since the early
90's -- so I may look at things a bit differently -- so I would be very
intersted in your thoughts on how you could use GCS and whether Spread
would be useful.

Cheers,

Jonathan

--
-------------------------------------------------------
Jonathan R. Stanton jonathan@xxxxxxxxxx
Dept. of Computer Science
Johns Hopkins University
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