Cluster Computing And Applications Essay

Cluster Computing and Applications
Mark Baker (University of Portsmouth, UK), Amy Apon (University of Arkansas, USA), Rajkumar Buyya (Monash University, Australia), Hai Jin (University of Southern California, USA) 18th September 2000

1. Introduction
The needs and expectations of modern-day applications are changing in the sense that they not only need computing resources (be they processing power, memory or disk space), but also the ability to remain available to service user requests almost constantly 24 hours a day and 365 days a year. These needs and expectations of today’s applications result in challenging research and development efforts in both the areas of computer hardware and software. It seems that as applications evolve they inevitably consume more and more computing resources. To some extent we can overcome these limitations. For example, we can create faster processors and install larger memories. But future improvements are constrained by a number of factors, including physical ones, such as the speed of light and the constraints imposed by various thermodynamic laws, as well as financial ones, such as the huge investment needed to fabricate new processors and integrated circuits. The obvious solution to overcoming these problems is to connect multiple processors and systems together and coordinate their efforts. The resulting systems are popularly known as parallel computers and they allow the sharing of a computational task among multiple processors. Parallel supercomputers have been in the mainstream of high-performance computing for the last ten years. However, their popularity is waning. The reasons for this decline are many, but include being expensive to purchase and run, potentially difficult to program, slow to evolve in the face of emerging hardware technologies, and difficult to upgrade without, generally, replacing the whole system. The decline of the dedicated parallel supercomputer has been compounded by the emergence of...