High-performance Server Clusters Research Articles

New Development of Parallel Conformal FDTD Method in Computational Electromagnetics Engineering

In this paper, we summrize the new development of hardware-acceleration techniques and a parallel conformal Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) method in computational electromagnetics engineering. We investigate the performance of a parallel conformal FDTD method on different hardware platforms, such as Intel and AMD processors, with vector-arithmetic logic unit (VALU) acceleration, a regular PC cluster, a high-performance server cluster, the use of a graphics-processing unit (GPU), and an IBM CELL processor. The FDTD method, which is parallel in nature, is one of the best candidate numerical methods for using multiple-core processors and computer clusters to efficiently simulate various electromagnetic problems. Several representative examples, such as a UWB (ultra-wideband) antenna array and reflector antennas, are employed to demonstrate the engineering applications of the parallel conformal FDTD method.

Predicting the behavior of large scale P2P systems by parallel discrete event simulation

P2P systems are becoming the dominator of Internet. Such systems are typically composed of thousands to millions of physical computers, which make it difficult to predict their behaviors without a large scale distributed system simulator. This paper is an attempt to predict the behavior of large scale P2P systems by building a novel parallel simulator: AegeanSim, which provides parallel discrete event simulation of such systems on high performance server clusters. We abstract the execution of P2P applications with a specific event model, and parallel the simulation of events in a cluster, thus expanding the simulation scale and boosting the simulation process dramatically. A 1-stage synchronization method is proposed to improve the performance. An event callback interface is designed to implement their application logic easily while keeping the simulator application-independent. We use AegeanSim to predict the behavior of a typical P2P system: BitTorrent. By comparing the simulation behavior of BT with that of related BT studies and verifying its efficiency, scalability and accuracy, we make predictions about the behavior of BT system assuming they are assaulted by different man-made system attacks. Some reasonable results are found: (1) Tracker isolation can hardly work because of its short attacking time window. (2) Limiting the bandwidth of BT may be an efficient way to control it.

Study on Transfer Model of Deployment System for High Performance Server Cluster

This paper proposes a multi-branch tree based TFTP transfer model to relieve the performance bottleneck of TFTP server.According to the fact that average bandwidth of cluster system decreases with the increase of the size of a cluster,this paper proposes bandwidth loss-based dynamic pipeline image transfer model which reveals the relation between node arrival and deployment performance.The proposed model is validated by mathematical analysis,simulation and real measurement.To improve the scalability of the proposed model,the cluster system is divided into partitions,and each partition has only one switch.All partitions concurrently work.A comparative measurement is performed among multicast,dependable multicast,BT and the proposed model.The results show that multicast and reliable multicast have better performance,however with worse reliability.The performance of the proposed model outperforms that of BT,and it just takes 17.2 seconds to deploy a 596MB system image to 48 servers.