Abstract:

Ant II is a new cluster architecture for low-power data-intensive computing which consists of big amounts of low-power embedded CPUs and local flash storage. The key contributions of this paper are the principles of the parallel administration framework towards cluster of wimpy nodes and the design and implementation of PEAK, which is an evolutionary, self-healing, hot-plugged, scalable, highly available, and high-performance distributed storage system and computing platform. It is developed with natural parallel programming language Erlang, which supports supervision tree, hot code swapping and sandboxing. It uses decentralized Dynamo architecture which provides great scalability and availability using chain replication on a consistent hashing ring. It builds on distributed meta-service management framework, and therefore can easily evolve. It is not only purely log-structured storage that provides the basis for high performance on flash storage, but also an analytic tool using MapReduce query language. The evaluation demonstrates that PEAK balances computation and I/O capabilities so as to enable efficient, massively parallel access to data.

Key words: cluster of wimpy nodes;administration framework;distributed system;evolutionary computation