Based On Ixp425 The Underlying Cluster System Design

With the rapidly development of computers hardware and software technologies, the clusters system, which are assembled with commercial PCs connecting together with high-speed network equipment, can get high cost-efficiency computing service. As the cost of PC hardware and network equipment continues to rapidly descend, the cluster have been accepted by more and more customers and it could be a important branch in the field of high performance computing.We have to design optimal cluster architecture and cluster software system to make cluster exhibit its high performance, high avaliablity and scalability. The cluster architecture is usually designed according to the application and the implementation of software system is based on the architectrue. The design of software involved in a range of key modules including communciation module, distribute cache module, load balance module and high availiability module. In order to implement the prospective system target, the quality of the cluster will directly impact on system performance and reliability,as well as future expansion.The thesis based on the project that embedded streaming media cluster server supported by Sichuan Science & Technology Fund to implement the streaming media cluster servers's hardware platform and the underlying software platform. The card,which contains the Ixp425 network processer at the core and power, memory, NPE as the main module, extends the PCI interface as a embedded device card inserting to the cluster node.With the implementation of hardware platform, we port the bootloader and uclinux OS as the card's OS platform steadily supporting the driver and top software. We design the PCI driver in the PC end and the driver in the card end. In order to implement the card's communciation we design the kernel thread and build the cluster's distributed cache mechanism to share the data among the clusters. In order to implement the management, update and synchronus for the distributed cache, we design the cache consistency module which supports the system call and converges to the driver module constituting the whole cluster's application platform base.During the author doing the research work of the project, the main job is: 1. Design and implement the embedded PCI card based on Ixp425 network processor, debugging the hardware circuit, porting the bootloader and uclinux OS.2. Design the cluster node host's PCI driver in linux OS and the driver in the PCI card in uclinux OS including the communciation kernel thread between cluster node and the comuniciation with the distributed cache management module.Then setup the cluster debug platform, programe the test code to test function of the cluster's communciation, store and management.