Dynamic gateways: A Novel Approach to Improve Networking Performance and Availability on Parallel Servers

摘要

Parallel servers realize scalability and availability by effectively using multiple hardware resources (i.e., nodes and disks). Scalability is improved by distributing processes and data onto multiple resources; and availability is maintained by substituting a failed resource with a spare one. Dynamic Gateways extends these features to networking, by balancing the traffic among multiple connections to the network in order to improve scalability, and detours traffic around failed resources to maintain availability. This is made transparent to the clients and to applications in the server by using proxy and gratuitous ARP to con trol the network traffic. A performance evaluation shows that Dynamic Gateways improves the scalability (allowing the maximum networking performance to increase with increasing number of connections) and the performance (improving throughput and reducing access latency).