Modeling and evaluation of a new cluster-based system for commercial applications

Abstract

We model and evaluate a new parallel processing system for commercial applications, so called SPAX. SPAX cost-effectively overcomes the SMP limitation by providing both scalability of the parallel processing system and application portability of the SMP. To investigate whether the new architecture satisfies the requirements of commercial applications, such as OLTP, we have built the system and workload model. The results of the simulation show that the IO subsystem becomes the bottleneck before the newly developed system network. We find that SPAX can still meet the IO requirement of the OLTP workload as its network and IO node support the flexible IO subsystem, in terms of the number of disk drives and IO nodes versus that of processing nodes.