Porting clondike to heterogeneous platforms

Abstract

Clustering plays an important role in today's computer networks. We can achieve a higher efficiency of the whole network infrastructure by simply using idle computing power of ordinary workstations. The Clondike project aims to create a universal non-dedicated peer-to-peer cluster where every participating node can benefit from its membership in the cluster. The peer-to-peer approach does not contain any single point of failure, so a high availability is guaranteed by design. So far, we have tested Clondike only in our laboratory with homogeneous computer network architecture, all the computer nodes were the same. In this paper, we report on experiments with moving the Clondike cluster closer to a real environment: with porting Clondike to a real office network with heterogeneous computers. We have run a distributed compilation of the Linux Kernel on both platforms to verify our results and to assess the weaknesses of the current solution and to identify further development needs.