Reliable Cluster Computing with a New Checkpointing RAID-x Architecture

In a serverless cluster of PCs or workstations, the cluster must allow remote file accesses or parallel I/O directly performed over disks distributed to all client nodes. We introduce a new distributed disk array, called the RAID-x, for use in serverless clusters. The RAID-x architecture is based on an orthogonal striping and mirroring (OSM) scheme, which exploits full-bandwidth and protects the system from all single disk failures. The performance of the RAID-x is experimentally proven superior to RAID-1 and NFS in the Linux cluster environment. We propose a new striped checkpointing scheme, leveraging on striped parallelism and pipelined writing of successive disk stripes. This RAID-x architecture greatly enhances the throughput, reliability, and availability of scalable clusters. It appeals especially to I/O-centric cluster applications.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: HCW
• Authors: Kai Hwang, Hai Jin, Roy S. C. Ho, Wonwoo Ro
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, Distributed Disk Array, HCW 2000, RAID-x Architecture, Serverless Clusters