The Virtual Interface Architecture
Providing guidance for both developers and users of large clustered systems, this book explains how VI provides a new interface between applications and switched interconnect hardware.
TABLE OF CONTENTS The Virtual Interface Architecture
Chapter 8: Applications
"The emergence of the Internet is changing the face of contemporary business and scientific computing, increasing the demand for server scalability and availability, while keeping costs under control. Clusters of servers, based on Intel processors and multiple industry-standards, like Virtual Interface Architecture, have emerged as one of the premier strategies to provide both high availability and scalability in the computationally-intensive Internet environment."
---Justin R. Rattner,
Director, Intel Microprocessor Research Lab and Intel Fellow
While VIA is an interesting technology, its importance lies in the benefits that it provides to applications. This chapter will provide an overview of some applications that have been developed for use with VIA, and look ahead to future application opportunities.
Scalable Databases
Scalable databases were a natural fit for the first deployments of VIA. These databases were written as distributed, scalable applications, and already had facilities for portable communications modules that could take advantage of a new interface such as VIA.
IBM DB2
IBM s DB2 Universal Database Enterprise Extended Edition (DB2 EEE) employs a shared-nothing software architecture in which server instances run on a scalable number of servers without directly sharing memory or disk. Shared-nothing is an extension of the Distributed Memory architecture (described in Chapter 2), which notes that disks, as well as memory, are not physically shared. The programming model for shared-nothing is message-passing.
The DB2 EEE architecture enables support for very large databases by dividing the database into partitions that can be stored and managed on separate servers of a shared-nothing hardware system.
Copyright Intel Corporation 2002 under license agreement with Books24x7
