Abstract - Technical Program - 2nd USENIX Windows NT Symposium
Scalability of the Microsoft Cluster Service
Werner Vogels, Dan Dumitriu, Ashutosh Agrawal, Teck Chia, and Katherine Guo
Cornell University
Abstract
An important argument for the introduction of
software managed clusters is that of scale: By constructing the cluster out of commodity
compute elements, one can, by simply adding new elements, improve the reliability of the
overall system in terms of performance and in availability. The limits to how far such a
cluster can be scaled seems to be dependent on the scalability of its management software,
which in its core has a collection of distributed algorithms to guarantee the correct
operation of the cluster. The complexity of these algorithms makes them a vulnerable
component of the system in terms of their impact on the overall scalability of the system.
This paper examines two of the distributed components of the Microsoft Cluster Service
[8] that are most likely to have an impact on its scalability: the membership and the
global update managers. The first sections of the paper will provide some general
background on these distributed services and scalability issues. After that the algorithms
used to implement these service are described in detail and an analysis of their impact on
scalability is given. The scalability analysis is based on an off-line analysis of the
algorithms as well as the results of on-line experiments on a cluster with a, in MSCS
terms, large number of nodes.
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