The architecture of the ICL GOLDRUSH MegaSERVER

Abstract

This paper discusses the requirements which are to be met by a parallel computer system if it is to satisfy the requirements of commercial database processing, and describes how one such system — the ICL GOLDRUSH MegaSERVER — has been designed to meet these requirements.

GOLDRUSH is a distributed store parallel processor consisting of up to 64 elements, each of which can co-operate in database processing, exploiting both the parallelism found within complex queries (intra-query parallelism) and that found between queries in On-Line Transaction Processing workloads (inter-query parallelism). The paper discusses the requirements of business critical database applications including high availability, integrity and manageability. It then details the architecture of GOLDRUSH in order to show how a commercially available system has been designed to meet these requirements; this includes resilience to failure of hardware components such as disks and processors, and the provision of system management applications which allow the parallel machine to be managed as a single system.