Geoffroy Vallée

OpenMosix, OpenSSI and Kerrighed: a comparative study

This paper presents a comparative study of Kerrighed, openMosix and OpenSSI, three single system image (SSI) operating systems for clusters. This experimental study gives an overview of SSI features offered by these SSI and evaluates performance of such features.

Kerrighed and data parallelism: cluster computing on single system image operating systems

A working single system image distributed operating system is presented. Dubbed Kerrighed, it provides a unified approach and support to both the MPI and the shared memory programming models. The system is operational in a 16-processor cluster at the Institut de Recherche en Informatique et Systemes Aleatoires in Rennes, France. In this paper, the system is described with emphasis on its main contributing and distinguishing factors, namely its DSM based on memory containers, its flexible handling of scheduling and checkpointing strategies, and its efficient and unified communications layer. Because of the importance and popularity of data parallel applications in these systems, we present a brief discussion of the mapping of two well known and established data parallel algorithms. It is shown that ShearSort is remarkably well suited for the architecture/system pair as is the ever so popular and important two-dimensional fast Fourier transform. (2D FFT).

Process Migration Based on Gobelins Distributed Shared Memory

Clusters are attractive for executing sequential and parallel applications. However, there is a need to design a cluster distributed operating system to provide a Single System Image. A cluster operating system providing both a DSM system and load balancing is attractive for efficiently executing a workload of sequential applications and shared memory parallel applications. Gobelins is a distributed operating system dedicated to clusters that provides both a DSM system and a process migration mechanism to support load balancing. In this paper, we present the implementation of Gobelins process migration mechanism which exploits Gobelins kernel level DSM system. We show that Gobelins DSM allows to implement simply an efficient migration mechanism, that can be used to move processes or threads among cluster nodes. A prototype of Gobelins has been implemented. Some performance results are presented in this paper.

A case for single system image cluster operating systems: The Kerrighed approach

In this paper, we present fundamental mechanisms for global process and memory management in an efficient single system image cluster operating system designed to execute workloads composed of high performance sequential and parallel applications. Their implementation in Kerrighed, our proposed distributed operating system, is composed of a set of Linux modules and a patch of less than 200 lines of code to the Linux kernel. Kerrighed is a unique single system image cluster operating system providing the standard Unix interface as well as distributed OS mechanisms such as load balancing on all cluster nodes. Our support for standard Unix interface includes support for multi-threaded applications and a checkpointing facility for both sequential and shared memory parallel applications. We present an experimental evaluation of the Kerrighed system and demonstrate the feasibility of the single system image approach at the kernel level.

Towards an efficient single system image cluster operating system

The lack of a single system image operating system (OS) for clusters restricts their use for parallel processing. We propose an approach for building an efficient single system image (SSI) cluster operating system. The proposed system implements distributed services performing global and dynamic resource management to offer high performance, high availability and ease of programming. The programming API of the OS running on each cluster node is kept unmodified but the high level OS services can benefit from all cluster resources. Our approach has been validated by a prototype based on Linux.

Design and Analysis of Fault Tolerance Mechanisms for Big Data Transfers

Increased growth of the data and the need to move the data between data centers, demands, an efficient data transfer tool which can, not only transfer the data at higher rates but also handle the faults occurred during the transfer. Absence of fault tolerance mechanisms, would need to retransmit the whole data, in case of any error during the transfer. Hence, fault tolerance is an important aspect of big data transfer tools. In this paper, we have considered LADS data transfer tool, which proved to be superior to the existing data transfer tools with respect to the speed of the transfer. However, absence of fault tolerance implementation in LADS might result in data retransmission and congestion issues upon errors. In this paper, we design and analyze fault tolerance mechanisms which can be used with LADS data transfer tool. We have proposed three different fault tolerance mechanisms, File logging, Transaction logging and Universal logging. Also, we have analyzed the space and performance overhead of these fault tolerance mechanisms on LADS data transfer tool.