Performance of a distributed architecture for query processing on workstation clusters

Abstract

A network of workstations (NOWs) is an attractive alternative to parallel database systems due to the cost advantage. In a typical database, client workstations (nodes) submit queries/transactions and receive responses from the database server. With even recent PC-based client nodes providing traditional workstation-class performance, performance improvements can be obtained by offloading some of the processing typically done on the traditional server node to these powerful client nodes. Parallel query processing takes advantage of the idle cycles on the client nodes to process the query. In this paper we introduce a distributed architecture for parallel query processing and study the performance of this architecture in various scenarios. We have implemented the distributed architecture using parallel virtual machine (PVM) on a Pentium-based NOW system. Our results show that the distributed architecture successfully achieves good speedups and scaleups. Furthermore, our results show that the distributed architecture handles both light and heavy workloads in the presence of a background (non-query) load.