|
Network RAID is a good idea in mass storage field. It can reduce response time and increase data transferring speed of storage system, especially to network application. But it is a problem that how to use network RAID to improve the performance of parallel processing system. It is current to use cluster architecture to develop high performance parallel computer. Cluster is a set of complete computers that can run one task at the same time through a high-speed network. The normal cluster belongs to non-shared architecture. This architecture makes cluster consume most of time on communicating with each other. Network RAID has its natural characteristic that is connected to network directly. Using network RAID in cluster makes a disk-shared architecture of cluster. There are two modules to use network RAID in cluster, one is using network RAID as a shared storage space, the other is using network RAID as a private storage space. As a shared storage space, network RAID records the public data that will be used by some nodes. As a private storage space, each node is provided with a segment of data space in network RAID. The other important problem is how the node of cluster communicates with network RAID. Because network RAID has two channels for network communication, one is command channel, the other is data channel, and nodes must be modified to adapt this communication module. We use TCP/IP protocol, and define some data transferring rules in application level. At last, it must be paid more attention to performance evaluation of cluster system. In normal cluster architecture, load is distributed into each node. But in disk-shared cluster architecture, some part of load may be assigned to network RAID. How to evaluate the performance is due to the part of load assigned to network RAID. This paper discusses above three problems, that are using module, communication module and performance, and provides a new disk-shared architecture of cluster that uses network RAID.
|
