This first portion of the book reviews hardware technologies that have an effect on server performance and architecture. The hardware analysis is broken up into two parts, first looking at processors and memory and then at I/O and peripheral subsystems.
The evolution of software technologies are then examined.
First of all, we present the key elements of systems architecture which must be understood before analyzing the evolution of server architecture.
As we shall see, a server's processing performance is limited by, among other things, microprocessor performance. In the search for high performance and to satisfy the goal of scalability, systems vendors have turned (since the end of the 60s) to multiprocessor systems. Multiprocessor servers fall into one of two major classes:
Tightly-coupled, or Symmetrical Multiprocessor (SMP), in which all the processors can see and use all systems resources (memory, I/O devices). An SMP operates under the control of just one copy of the operating system, which manages all the system resources.
Loosely-coupled, in which a system is constructed by interconnecting (using a fast local area network technology) some number of independent systems, each having its own resources (processors, memory, I/O) and running under the control of its own copy of the operating system. Each such system is called a node.
Clusters and Massively Parallel (MPP) systems both fall into the loosely-coupled classification. The term loose-coupling refers...
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