CISE Research Instrumentation: System Support for Scalable, Fault-Tolerant Computing and Services on PC Clusters

EIA-9986046

Thu D. Nguyen

Rutgers University

CISE Research Instrumentation: System Support for Scalable, Fault-Tolerant Computing and Service on PC Clusters

A high-end PC cluster is the crucial computing infrastructure for research in the recently established Distributed Computing Laboratory (DISCO Lab) in the Department of Computer Science at Rutgers University. The requested cluster consists of 8 quad-processor PCs, a 16-port Alteon Gb/s Ethernet LAN with layer 4 switching capabilities and a 16 NICs, and a 16-port Myrinet Gb/s LAN with 8 NICs. This cluster will support research in several projects that jointly, are intended to improve the state-of-the-art in cluster computing, moving towards the realization of a robust and efficient distributed computing environment for clusters of PCs. In particular, this proposal describes four projects: (i) developing a robust software distributed shared-memory environment to support emerging cluster applications, (ii) building system support for efficient global utilization of cluster resources (iii) exploring the construction of highly available operating systems, and (iv) implementing distributed applications such as data mining, scalable servers, and interactive continuous media applications and system mechanisms and policies to support them efficiently on clusters.