11-08-2012, 03:51 PM
RAIN-Reliable Array Of Independent Nodes
RELIABLE ARRAY.doc (Size: 301.5 KB / Downloads: 20)
ABSTRACT
Nowadays the number of people who are using Internet is dramatically increasing. With no hesitation, it can be said that the Internet is indeed the most popular media of communication prevailing in the present world scenario. But many of the users are nowadays facing the problem of failure in maintaining the connection with the cyber world.
The prime reason for the problem is that in the existing technology of connection with the Internet, a client is connected to a server through a number of nodes which depends on each other to facilitate the flow of information. The problem with the existing technology is that, even if a single intermediate node malfunctions, the whole system collapses.
The solution to the problem is RAIN-Reliable Array Of Independent Nodes developed by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), in collaboration with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
RAIN technology was able to offer the solution by minimizing the number of nodes in the chain connecting the client and server and also by making the existing nodes more robust and independent of each other. Also RAIN technology provides the novel feature of replacing a faulty node by a healthy one there by avoiding the break in information flow. In effect with the aid of RAIN connection between a client and server can be maintained despite all the existing problems.
Introduction
Back Ground-
The Internet is changing the way that people manage and access information. In the last five years, the amount of traffic on the Internet has been growing at an exponential rate. The World Wide Web has evolved from a hobbyists' toy to become one of the dominating media of our society. Ecommerce has grown past adolescence and multimedia content has come of age. Communication, computation and storage are converging to reshape the lives of everyone. Looking forward, this growth will continue for some time. The question is: what can we do to scale the Internet infrastructure to meet this growth?
Reliability and Performance
The primary function of the Internet is for information to flow from where it is stored, traditionally known as a server, to where it is requested, commonly referred to as a client. The Internet is the network that interconnects all clients and servers to allow information to flow in an orderly way. While people become more and more dependent on this network, they demand that it become faster and more reliable. As a result, reliability and performance are becoming key challenges in many parts of the Internet infrastructure.
The communication path between a client and a server can be viewed as a chain. Each device along the path between the client and the server is a link in the chain. For example, for a user to receive a HTML page from yahoo.com, he or she would issue a request, which travels from the user's client, through a number of routers and firewalls and other devices to reach the Yahoo web server, before the data will return along the same or a similar chain. The strength of this chain, both in terms of throughput and reliability, will determine the user experience of the Internet. So, how do we make this chain stronger?
RAIN Technology
Origin
RAIN technology originated in a research project at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), in collaboration with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The name of the original research project was RAIN, which stands for Reliable Array of Independent Nodes. The goal of the RAIN project was to identify key software building blocks for creating reliable distributed applications using off-the-shelf hardware. The focus of the research was on high-performance, fault-tolerant and portable clustering technology for space-borne computing.
Led by Caltech professor Shuki Bruck, the RAIN research team in 1998 formed a company called Rainfinity. Rainfinity, located in Mountain View, Calif., is already shipping its first commercial software package derived from the RAIN technology, and company officials plan to release several other Internet-oriented applications.
The RAIN project was started four years ago at Caltech to create an alternative to the expensive, special-purpose computer systems used in space missions. The Caltech researchers wanted to put together a highly reliable and available computer system by distributing processing across many low-cost commercial hardware and software components.
Fault-tolerant Interconnect Topologies
We were faced with the question of how to connect computing nodes to switching networks to maximize the network’s resistance to partitioning. Many distributed computing algorithms face trouble when presented with a large set of nodes that have become partitioned from the others. A network that is resistant to partitioning should loose only some constant number of nodes given that we do not exceed some number of failures. After additional failures we may see partitioning of the set of compute nodes, ie, some fraction of the total number of compute nodes may be lost. By carefully choosing how we connect our compute nodes to the switches, we can maximize a system’s ability to resist partitioning in the presence of faults.
RELIABLE ARRAY.doc (Size: 301.5 KB / Downloads: 20)
ABSTRACT
Nowadays the number of people who are using Internet is dramatically increasing. With no hesitation, it can be said that the Internet is indeed the most popular media of communication prevailing in the present world scenario. But many of the users are nowadays facing the problem of failure in maintaining the connection with the cyber world.
The prime reason for the problem is that in the existing technology of connection with the Internet, a client is connected to a server through a number of nodes which depends on each other to facilitate the flow of information. The problem with the existing technology is that, even if a single intermediate node malfunctions, the whole system collapses.
The solution to the problem is RAIN-Reliable Array Of Independent Nodes developed by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), in collaboration with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
RAIN technology was able to offer the solution by minimizing the number of nodes in the chain connecting the client and server and also by making the existing nodes more robust and independent of each other. Also RAIN technology provides the novel feature of replacing a faulty node by a healthy one there by avoiding the break in information flow. In effect with the aid of RAIN connection between a client and server can be maintained despite all the existing problems.
Introduction
Back Ground-
The Internet is changing the way that people manage and access information. In the last five years, the amount of traffic on the Internet has been growing at an exponential rate. The World Wide Web has evolved from a hobbyists' toy to become one of the dominating media of our society. Ecommerce has grown past adolescence and multimedia content has come of age. Communication, computation and storage are converging to reshape the lives of everyone. Looking forward, this growth will continue for some time. The question is: what can we do to scale the Internet infrastructure to meet this growth?
Reliability and Performance
The primary function of the Internet is for information to flow from where it is stored, traditionally known as a server, to where it is requested, commonly referred to as a client. The Internet is the network that interconnects all clients and servers to allow information to flow in an orderly way. While people become more and more dependent on this network, they demand that it become faster and more reliable. As a result, reliability and performance are becoming key challenges in many parts of the Internet infrastructure.
The communication path between a client and a server can be viewed as a chain. Each device along the path between the client and the server is a link in the chain. For example, for a user to receive a HTML page from yahoo.com, he or she would issue a request, which travels from the user's client, through a number of routers and firewalls and other devices to reach the Yahoo web server, before the data will return along the same or a similar chain. The strength of this chain, both in terms of throughput and reliability, will determine the user experience of the Internet. So, how do we make this chain stronger?
RAIN Technology
Origin
RAIN technology originated in a research project at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), in collaboration with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The name of the original research project was RAIN, which stands for Reliable Array of Independent Nodes. The goal of the RAIN project was to identify key software building blocks for creating reliable distributed applications using off-the-shelf hardware. The focus of the research was on high-performance, fault-tolerant and portable clustering technology for space-borne computing.
Led by Caltech professor Shuki Bruck, the RAIN research team in 1998 formed a company called Rainfinity. Rainfinity, located in Mountain View, Calif., is already shipping its first commercial software package derived from the RAIN technology, and company officials plan to release several other Internet-oriented applications.
The RAIN project was started four years ago at Caltech to create an alternative to the expensive, special-purpose computer systems used in space missions. The Caltech researchers wanted to put together a highly reliable and available computer system by distributing processing across many low-cost commercial hardware and software components.
Fault-tolerant Interconnect Topologies
We were faced with the question of how to connect computing nodes to switching networks to maximize the network’s resistance to partitioning. Many distributed computing algorithms face trouble when presented with a large set of nodes that have become partitioned from the others. A network that is resistant to partitioning should loose only some constant number of nodes given that we do not exceed some number of failures. After additional failures we may see partitioning of the set of compute nodes, ie, some fraction of the total number of compute nodes may be lost. By carefully choosing how we connect our compute nodes to the switches, we can maximize a system’s ability to resist partitioning in the presence of faults.