Abstract
The cluster architecture has played an important role in high-end computing for the past 20 years. With the advent of Internet services, big data, and cloud computing, traditional clusters face three challenges: 1) providing flexible system balance among computing, memory, and I/O capabilities; 2) reducing resource pooling overheads; and 3) addressing low performance-power efficiency. This position paper proposes a software-defined cluster (SDC) architecture to deal with these challenges. The SDC architecture inherits two features of traditional cluster: its architecture is multicomputer and it has loosely-coupled interconnect. SDC provides two new mechanisms: global I/O space (GIO) and hardware-supported native access (HNA) to remote devices. Application software can define a virtual cluster best suited to its needs from resources pools provided by a physical cluster, and traditional cluster ecosystems need no modification. We also discuss a prototype design and implementation of a 32-processor cloud server utilizing the SDC architecture.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Rahul K. Microservers target workloads and architecture trends. Technical Report, Intel, April 2013.
Bell G, Gray J, Szalay A. Petascale computational systems. Computer, 2006, 39(1): 110–112.
Hemsoth N. The new era of computing: An interview with “Dr. Data”. Jan. 2012. http://www.datanami.com/datanami/2012/01/23/the_new_era_of_computing_an_interview_with_dr_data.html, Jan. 2015.
Bergman K, Borkar S, Campbell D et al. ExaScale computing study: Technology challenges in achieving ExaScale systems. Technique Report, Sept. 2008. http://www.cse.nd.edu/Reports/2008/TR-2008-13.pdf, Jan, 2015.
Kreutz D, Ramos F M V, Esteves Verissimo P, Esteves Rothenberg C, Azodolmolky S, Uhlig S. Software-defined networking: A comprehensive survey. Proceedings of the IEEE, 2015, 103(1): 14–76.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Special Section on Applications and Industry
The work was supported by the National High Technology Research and Development 863 Program of China under Grant No. 2013AA01A209.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Nie, H., Yang, XJ. & Liu, TY. Software-Defined Cluster. J. Comput. Sci. Technol. 30, 252–258 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-015-1519-0
Received:
Revised:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-015-1519-0