Network Of Workstations: NOW

Last update: 29/10/1998
This page encloses numerous WEB links about the Network Of Workstations, Cluster Of Workstations and related research area.
Version Francaise de cette page.

Network Of Workstations: a Tutorial (in French)

Copy of the slides for the RenPar'8 (A 1996 French Parallelism Meeting) conference, "Network Of Workstations: Alternatives, Future or Transitional State of the Scalable Parallel Architectures?", in French, 2.6 Mo.

Network Of Workstations: Main Web Links

Rule for the "new" tags: a link is tagged with "new" only because it has been recently included in this page.

Commercial Network of Workstations:

IBM SPx

GIGAswitch and Memory Channel of DEC

Fujitsu AP3000

Servers from High Volume Components:

NCR WorldMark (SHVS : Standard High Volume Server of Intel)

SEQUENT NUMA-Q (SHVS + SCI)

DATA GENERAL NUMA (SHVS + SCI)

Main Research Projects:

ATOMIC-2 (Where Myrinet come from, and the next step...)

AVALANCHE (HP + Myrinet + communication and cache unit)

DMRC (Distributed Multimedia Research Center)

GAMMA (12 Pentium with linux + active messages + Fast Ethernet)

HPVM (Clusters of Pentium + Myrinet, Servernet, etc.)

LANL Workstation Clusters (8 RS/6000 + 1 SP2 (2noeuds) with a Gigaswitch (dec) interconnect)

MPC (a french network of PC with a custom interconnect)

NAS Davinci 8 SGI Power Challenge multiprocessors (some of them monoprocessors) connected by Ethernet, HIPPI, FDDI et ATM

NOW (The well known project)

PAPERS (Network of workstations + a hardware for fast global operations)

PARASTATION (a custom interconnect for stations and PC)

RWCP PC Cluster (36 PC Pentium 166 + Myrinet)

RWCP WCS (36 SuperSparc 20+ Myrinet)

SHRIMP (PC + Intel Paragon interconnect)

StarT-Voyager (clusters of PPC 604, NES : Network Endpoint Subsystem and Arctic router)

Wisconsin Wind Tunnel (COW, Vortex, Typhoon, Tampest, etc.)

Other projects involving the Network Of Workstations:

DSM projects (Distributed Shared Memory: Treadmarks, CVM, Millipede, etc.

Fast Interconnects:

MYRINET

ATM (FORE)

SCI (Vitesse, Dolphin)

SERVERNET (an interconnect of TANDEM, successor of TNET?)

Main Fast Messaging Libraries:

VIA: Virtual Interface Architecture

ACTIVE MESSAGES

FAST MESSAGE

U-Net

BIP (French very fast messaging for Myrinet, x86 and Alpha)

Some Programming Models for clusters of SMP:

SIMPLE (Collective communication primitives)

Little TiPI (Unified versus Hybrid memory models, a project of the Clumps Ingestigation Agency)

Some Programming Models with Load Managment:

MPVM (message passing and process migration)

NEXUS (multithreading)

PM2 (multithreading)

Cilk (multithreading)

Object Programming

CORBA

JavaRMI

Operating Systems for Network Of Workstations:

AMOEBA (micro-kernel and distributed)

Chorus (micro-kernel)

GLUNIX (on top of UNIX)

MOSIX (on top of UNIX)

Resources Managment for Network Of Workstations:

Cluster Management Software (main software)

Condor

LoadLeveler (IBM)

File Systems

xFS

Some Network Of Workstations already in use for Production:

RTCPP (Regional Training Center for Parallel Processing, North Carolina State University)

NAS Report (McDonnell Douglas, Pratt & Whitney, Boeing)

PEIRS (Parallel Integrated Environment for Reliability of Structures of existing industrial plants)

Conferences/Workshops

Second NOW/Cluster Workshop

Some other links:

ASPLOS Workshop NOW/COW

AmesLab workshop

Some references about this subject:

[AMZ96] C. Amza et. al., "TreadMarks: Shared Memory Computing on Networks of Workstations", IEEE Computer, Feb 1996.

[AND95] T. E. Anderson et. al., "A case for NOW (Networks of Workstations)", IEEE Micro, Feb 1995.

[AND96] T. E. Anderson et. al., "Serveless Network File Systems", ACM Tran. Computer Systems, Vol 14, No. 1, February 1996.

[ARP 94] R. H. Arpaci et. al., "The Interaction of Parallel and Sequential Workloads on a Network of Workstations", UC Berkeley Technical Report CS-94-838, 1994, http://now.cs.berkeley.edu

[ASA95] S. Asami et. al., "The Design of Large-Scale, Do-It-Yourself RAIDs", submited but not yet published, draft available at http://now.cs.berkeley.edu, Nov 1995.

[BER93] B. Bergten, M, Couprie and P. Valduriez, "Overview of Parallel Architectures for Databases", The computer journal, Vol. 36, No. 8, 1993.

[BLU95] M. A. Blumrich et. al., "Virtual-Memory-Mapped Network Interfaces", IEEE Micro, Feb 1995.

[BOD95] N. J. Boden et. al., "Myrinet: A Gigabit-per-Second Local Area Network", IEEE Micro, Feb 1995.

[CAS95] J. Casas et. al., "MPVM: A Migration Transparent Version of PVM", Computing Systems, Vol. 8, No. 2, Spr 1995.

[CHA96] C.-C. Chang et. al., "Design and Performance of Active Messages on the SP-2", Cornell CS Tech. Report 96-1572, Feb 1996.

[COX94] A. L. Cox et. al., "Software Versus Hardware Shared-Memory Implementation: A case Study", Proceedings of International Symposium on Computer Architecture, 1994.

[CVE96] Z. Cvetanovic and D. Bhandarkar, "Performance characterization of the Alpha 21164 Microprocessor using TP and SPEC workloads", Proceedings of second HPCA,1996.

[DAH94] M. D. Dahlin et. al., "Cooperative Caching: Using Remote Client Memory to Improve File System Performance", Proceedings of OSDIÕ94, 1994.

[EDJ94] G. Edjlali et. al., "DataParallel Programming in An Adaptative Environment", Tech Report CS-TR-3350 and UMIACS-TR-94-109, University of Maryland, DCS and UMIACS, Sept 1994.

[EIK92] T von Eicken et. al., "Active Messages: A Mechanism for Integrated Communication and Computation", Proceedings of 19th ISCA, May 1992.

[EIK95] T. von Eicken et. al., "Low-Latency Communication Over ATM Networks Using Active Messages", IEEE Micro, Feb 1995.

[GIL96] R. B. Gillett, "Memory Channel Network for PCI", IEEE Micro, Feb 1996.

[GUS92] D. B. Gustavson, "The Scalable Coherent Interface and the Related Standards Projects", IEEE Micro 12, Feb 1992.

[GUS94] D. Gustavson and A. Li, "Local Area MultiProcessor: The Scalable Coherent Interface", in Defining the Global Information Infrastructure: Infrastructure, Systems, and Services, Stephen F. Lundstrom, Editor, SPIE Press, Vol 56, 1994.

[GUS95] D. Gustavson and Q. Li, "SCI-based Local Area MultiProcessor (LAMP)", Tutorial Notes of HPCA 1, Jan 1995.

[HAL96] T. R. Halfhill, "Inside the Web PC", Byte, Mar 1996.

[HOR95] R. W. Horst, "TNet: A Reliable System Area Network", IEEE Micro, Feb 1995.

[KAR96] M. Karlsson and P. Stenstrsm, "Performance of a Cluster-Based Multiprocessor Built from ATM Switches and Bus-Based Multiprocessor Servers", Prpceedings of HPCA II, Feb 1996.

[KEL94] P. Keleher et. al., "TreadMarks: Distributed Shared Memory on Standard Workstations and Operating Systems", Proceedings of Usenix Conference, Winter 94, 1994.

[MIN95] R. Minnich, D. Burns, F. Hady, "The Memory-Integrated Network Interface", IEEE Micro, Feb 1995.

[MUT91] M. W. Mutka, M. Livny, "The available capacity of a privately owned workstation environment", Performance Evaluation 12, Elsevier, North-Holland, 1991

[MUT92] M. W. Mutka, "Estimating Capacity For Sharing in a Privately Owned Workstation Environment", IEEE Trans. Software Engineering, Vol 18, No. 4, April 1992.

[PAK95] Scott Pakin et. al., "High Performance Messaging on Workstations: Illinois Fast Messages (FM) for Myrinet, Proceedings of SupercomputingÕ 95, 1995.

[REN89] R. Van Renesse, H. Van Staveren and A. S. Tanenbaum, "The Performance Of The Amoeba Distributed Operating System", Software-Practice and Experience, Vol 19, March 1989.

[SCO96] S. Scott, "The Gigaring Channel", IEEE Micro, Vol 16, No. 1, Feb 1996.

[TAN91] A. S. Tanenbaum, M. F. Kaashoek, R. van Renesse, H. Bal, "The Amoeba Distributed Operating System - A Status Report", Computer communications, Vol. 14 , pp. 324-335, Jul 1991.

[WAL94] D. W. Walker, "The design of a standard message passing interface for distributed memory concurrent computers", Parallel Computing, Vol 20, 1994.

[WOO95] Alan Wood, "Predicting Client/Serveur Availability", IEEE Computer, Apr 1995.

Contact for this page:

For comments, discussions, remarks or for link propositions, contact: Franck Cappello