From: Chuck Reeves (creeves_at_windows.microsoft.com)
Date: Wed Feb 25 2004 - 14:43:37 PST
The paper, "Cluster-based Scalable Network Services" was written by a
number researchers from the University of California at Berkeley around
1997. It describes the design and application of a general platform,
supporting the development of highly available and scalable internet
applications using commodity hardware for clustering. The authors make
the case that ACID semantics such as those associated with transaction
database application are not required to effectively service web
requests. There design leverages this postion to improve the performance
and availability of the system, while adopting a simpler architecture.
As a result, the system will respond with partial or out-of-date
information in periods of transition or failure.
The general architecture identifies 3 distinct roles in the system.
Front Ends (Service) that marshal requests between users and the
input/output queues for the worker elements in the rest of the system.
The worker pool (TACC) processes requests and implements the business
logic of the system. I thought the suggested model for using a pipeline
architecture for this portion of the application was interesting. The
third element is the scalable network service infrastructure (SNS). This
component provides a general framework for scalability, load-balancing,
fault tolerance, monitoring and logging.
Two applications of this platform are discussed. The first is Transend,
a filtering component that transforms images (and potentially other
large file media into formats) into a lower fidelity in an effort to
reduce the transmitted file size and occupied network bandwidth. The
second is a search engine named HotBot. It leverages a set of statically
partitioned databases to service keyword search requests. I didn't think
the HotBot implementation leveraged the features of the system very
effectively.
In general this system seems to be an application server, providing an
environment for hosting componentized applications similiar to MTS or
J2EE.
Chuck Reeves, creeves_at_microsoft.com
Microsoft | Windows | Directory Services
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