The Hardware Architecture of the ICL GOLDRUSH MegaSERVER

摘要

This paper describes the hardware architecture of the ICL GOLDRUSH MegaSERVER, a distributed store parallel machine designed to operate as ah open database server. The system is sold by ICL to commercial customers who require a high performance, high availability platform to support their critical business applications. GOLDRUSH consists of up to 64 Elements, each of which can cooperate in database processing, exploiting both the parallelism found within complex queries and that found between queries hi On-Line Transaction Processing workloads. The Elements are connected by a very high performance (1.2 GBytes/sec) internal network. Each Element has local disks to store the database. Some Elements have external comms connections allowing clients to connect to the system and so send queries into it for processing. Large tape libraries can be connected to multiple Elements, so allowing databases to be archived (and restored) hi parallel at high speeds. This paper discusses the architectural options for the design of high performance computers, explaining why the Distributed Store Architecture was chosen for GOLDRUSH. It then describes the design of the key aspects of the system including the parallel Elements, the internal network and the cabinets.