Miscellaneous
*Load-balanced and high-availability severs (LVS-HA)<img>
- Failover clustering allows Network Administrators to significantly improve quality of service levels for practically every TCP/IP based network service, such as Web, Mail, News, and FTP. Unlike distributed processing clusters (Beowulf Clusters), high-availability clusters seamlessly and transparently integrate existing stand-alone, non-cluster aware applications together into a single virtual network, providing the architectural framework necessary to allow the network to continuously and effortlessly grow to meet performance and reliability demands.
- Load balancing clusters integrate multiple systems that share the load of incoming requests in an equitably distributed manner. The systems do not work together on a single process, but rather handle incoming requests independent of one another. This type of cluster is especially suited to ISP and E-commerce applications that require real-time resolution of many incoming requests.
- Currently, we setup a PC cluster for high availability and load balancing usage. It is made up of 1 dual ABIT VP6 SMP-based PC with two IntelO PIII processors and 6 ABIT VT6 PCs with six IntelO Celeron processors. Nodes are connected using Fast Ethernet with a maximum bandwidth of 100Mbps, through a 16-port switch.
* Parallel virtual file systems (PVFS) and applications
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- In recent years the disparity between I/O performance and processor performance has led to I/O bottlenecks in many applications, especially those using large data sets. A popular approach for alleviating this kind of bottleneck is the use of parallel file systems. Parallel Virtual File System (PVFS) developed at Clemson University that supports the UNIX I/O interface and allows existing UNIX I/O programs to use PVFS files without recompiling.
- The familiar UNIX file tools (ls, cp, rm, etc.) will all operate on PVFS files and directories as well. This is accomplished via a Linux kernel module which is provided as a separate package. Currently, we install, integrate, and test PVFS on our cluster by using six ABIT KT7 machines with six AMD Duron 600MHz processors. Nodes are connected using Fast Ethernet with a maximum bandwidth of 100Mbps, through a 16-port switch.
* Pervasive computing
* Wireless communications