[Linux-cluster] Re: [cgl_discussion] Re: [dcl_discussion] Clustersummit materials

[Jonathan Stanton]

Hi,

I just joined the linux-cluster list after seeing a few of the messages 
that were cross-posted to linux-kernel. 

On Thu, Aug 12, 2004 at 03:59:10PM -0700, Steven Dake wrote:
> Lars
> 
> Thanks for posting transis.  I had a look at the examples and API.  The
> API is of course different then openais and focused on client/server
> architecture.

If you havn't looked at it already, you might want to try out the Spread
group communication system. 

http://www.spread.org/

It is, conceptually although not code-wise, a decendant of the Transis
work (and the Totem system from UCSB)  and is relatively widely used as a
production quality group messaging system (Some apache modules use it
along with a number of large web-clusters, a few commercial clustered
storage systems, and a lot of custom replication apps). It is not under
GPL but is open-source under a bsd-style (but not exactly the same)
license.

Like transis it has a client-server architecture (and a simpler API). 

> I tried a performance test by sending a 64k message, and then receiving
> it 10 times with two nodes.  This operation takes about 5 seconds on my
> hardware which is 128k/sec.  I was expecting more like 8-10MB/sec.  Is
> there anything that can be done to improve the performance?

I would expect transis to definitely do better then 128k/s given tests we
ran a number of years ago, but on upto medium sized lan environments the
totem/spread protocols are generally faster with less cpu overhead. I know
Spread could get 80Mb/s a number of years ago. We recently re-ran a clean
set of benchmarks and wrote them up. You can find them at:

http://www.cnds.jhu.edu/pub/papers/cnds-2004-1.pdf

I admit some bias as I'm one of the lead developers of Spread, and we (the 
developers) have been building group messaging systems since the early 
90's -- so I may look at things a bit differently -- so I would be very 
intersted in your thoughts on how you could use GCS and whether Spread 
would be useful. 

Cheers,

Jonathan

-- 
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Jonathan R. Stanton         jonathan at cs.jhu.edu
Dept. of Computer Science   
Johns Hopkins University    
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