Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
Analysis
Client
Node
The test system has one front-end node using Table 3. Efficiency of the processing
Pentium IV 3.0 GHz (with HyperThreading), 512 MB computed from Table 2.
RAM, and 120 GB hard disk. There are 8 compute
nodes in the system. For the compute nodes, Pentium No. of Number of Compute Nodes
III 750 MHz, with 128 MB RAM and 40 GB Disk are request 1 2 4 8
used. Both front-end and compute node use Windows 10 1.00 0.69 0.68 0.47
Server 2003 as an operating system. For the test client,
50 1.00 0.72 0.73 0.59
PC with AthlonXP 1600+ (1.4 GHz) processor, 256
MB RAM, and 40 GB hard disk running Windows XP 100 1.00 0.66 0.64 0.56
Professional is used. All machines are connected 500 1.00 0.66 0.64 0.59
through Fast Ethernet switch. 1000 1.00 0.66 0.64 0.60
In the test problem, we consider all stocks that are
currently listed in the Stock Exchange of Thailand (405 From the experimental results it can be seen that in
equities), and we use the actual historical prices from term of performance, our system can deliver a very
January 2, 2002 to December 30, 2003. good performance. Using 8 nodes, the total calculation
time has been reduced by 4.8 times. For a fixed
4.2. Results and discussion workload, speedup of the system increases with the
number of compute nodes. This happens because the
We test our system by using a simulated client work is distributed throughout the system. However,
program to send multiple simultaneous requests to the this speedup increases eventually levels off due to the
scalable VaR calculation system. We record the time high overhead inherent to the system. If more
spent to finish 10, 50, 100, 500, and 1000 simultaneous machines are available for testing, we may able to
determine this limit. common Windows based platform), enable us to build
We also see that when the number of compute nodes a scalable system for demanding needs. During the
is fixed, speedup tends to increase as the workload course of the development, we found that Windows
increases. However, this might not be obvious for a cluster development is simple since the program
small number of nodes (such as 2 nodes) and small development tool such as visual studio and C#
number of requests (such as 10, 50, and 100) because language is powerful. Moreover, we think that web
the startup and fixed cost overhead is high. service is a well developed and robust technology,
In addition, when we consider the system’s which provides a good reason for adopting Windows
efficiency (defined as the speedup divided by number cluster technology for business applications.
of compute node), the efficiency of the system tends to The proposed architecture, although initially
increase when the number of node increases with the designed to work with Microsoft Windows platform,
workload (see Table 1). Thus, the system can scale up can be applied to other cluster platforms and
well and function more efficiently with more technology, e.g., NPACI Rocks cluster, and Beowulf
workload. This is an appealing characteristic for a Cluster.
high-throughput application.
6. References
Speedup Ratio by Num ber of Processor
6.00 [1] P. Jorion, Value at Risk, 2nd Edition, McGraw-Hill, 2001
5.00 10
[2] M. Snir, S. Otto, S. Huss-Lederman, D. Walker and J.
50
Dongarra, MPI: The Complete Reference Volume 1 - The
4.00 100
Speedup Ratio
500
MPI Core, 2nd edition, MIT Press, 1998
3.00 1000
[3] W. Gropp, S. Huss-Lederman, A. Lumsdaine, E. Lusk, B.
2.00 Nitzberg, W. Saphir and M. Snir, MPI: The Complete
Reference Volume 2 - The MPI-2 Extensions, MIT Press,
1.00
1998
0.00
1 2 4 8 [4] A. Geist, A. Beguelin, J. Dongarra, W. Jiang , R.
Num ber of Processors (nodes) Manchek, V. S. Sunderam, PVM: Parallel Virtual Machine:
A Users' Guide and Tutorial for Network Parallel
Computing, MIT Press, 1994.
Figure 7. Speedup plot of the test results
[5] J. Grosling, B. Joy, G. Steele, G. Bracha, The Java
Efficiency by Num ber of Processor
Language Specification, 3rd Edition, Addison-Wesley
1.20 Professional, 2005.
0.60
[7] W. Gropp, E. Lusk, T. Sterling, Beowulf Cluster
10
Computing with Linux, 2nd Edition, MIT Press, 2003.
50
0.40
100
[8] J. D. Sloan, High Performance Linux Clusters: With
500
0.20 Oscar, Rocks, openMosix, And MPI, O'Reilly & Associates,
1000
2004.
0.00
1 2 4 8
Number of Processors (nodes) [9] D. A. Lifka, “High Performance Computing with
Microsoft Windows 2000”, Technical White Paper,
http://webserver.tc.cornell.edu/hpc/papers/cluster20012.pdf.
Figure 8. Efficiency plot of the results
[10] T. Erl, Service-Oriented Architecture: A Field Guide to
5. Conclusion Integrating XML and Web Services, Prentice Hall PTR, 2004.