Evaluation of a Cluster-Based System for the OLTP Application

In this paper, we have modeled and evaluated a new parallel processing system called Scalable Parallel computer Architecture based on Xbar (SPAX) for commercial applications. SMP systems are widely used as servers tor commercial applications; however, they have very limited scalability. SPAX cost-effectively overcomes the SMP limitation by providing both scalability and application portability. To investigate whether the new architecture satisfies the requirements of commercial applications, we have built a system model and a workload model. The results of the simulation study show that the I/O subsystem becomes the major bottleneck. We found that SPAX can still meet the I/O requirement of the OLTP workload as it supports flexible I/O subsystem. We also investigated what will be the next most important bottleneck in SPAX and how to remove it. We found that the newly developed system network called Xcent-Net will not be a bottleneck in the I/O data path. We also show the optimal configuration that is to be considered for system tuning.