User-Level Communication in Cluster-Based Servers

Clusters of commodity computers are currently being used to provide the scalability required by severalpopular Internet services. In this paper we evaluate an efficient cluster-based WWW server, as a function of the characteristicsof the intra-cluster communication architecture. More specifically, we evaluate the impact of processor overhead, networkbandwidth, remote memory writes, and zero-copy data transfers on the performance of our server. Our experimental results with an 8-node cluster and four real WWW traces show that networkbandwidth affects the performanceof ourserverby only 6%. In contrast, user-level communication can improve performance by as much as 29%. Low processor overhead, remote memory writes, and zero-copyall makesmall contributionstowardsthis overallgain. Tobe able to extrapolatefromourexperimentalresults,we usean analytical model to assess the performance of our server under different workloadcharacteristics,different numbersof cluster nodes, and higher perform...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: HPCA
• Authors: Enrique V. Carrera, Srinath Rao, Liviu Iftode, Ricardo Bianchini
• Keywords: Cluster-based Www Server, HPCA 2002, Memory Writes, Processor Overhead