Designing an enhanced PC cluster system for scalable network services

With the increasing availability of inexpensive yet powerful personal computers and servers, there has been an increasing trend toward personal computer cluster systems for network services. In this paper, we present a small-scale personal computer based cluster system for network servers as a low-cost alternative to traditional high-performance computing systems. The enhanced cluster system for scalable network services (CSSNS) consists of the parallel virtual file system (PVFS), the Linux virtual server (LVS), the director, and several high-end Pentium PC connected by high-speed switched Ethernet networks for I/O nodes and cluster nodes. The design and development of the cluster system for scalable network services is characterized by its high performance, high availability, high scalable file system, low cost, load balance on cluster servers, and convenient managing/setup for a broad range of applications. The transmission performance experiments for the entire system further validates and confirms that CSSNS is truly a self-made high-performance, high reliability and scalability personal computer based cluster system for scalable network servers.