The Beehive Cluster System




Beehive: Applications driven Systems support for Cluster Computing


Faculty:

Dr. Umakishore Ramachandran

Students (Past):

Aman Singla (aman@atheros.com)
Anand Sivasubramaniam
Gautam Shah
Ivan Yanasak


Students (Present):

Namgeun Jeong


Introduction:

The primary objective of the Beehive project is in contributing towards ``Ubiquitous Parallel Computing''. We focus on a cluster of workstations to exploit their low cost, hardware scalability, flexibility through software components for aiding parallel computing, and inherent amenability to supporting high-availability and reconfiguration. On the application's side we target newer domains which stand to gain through parallel computing and can be seen as ``enabling applications'' to be responsible for pervasiveness of parallel computing to everyday life. The ``applications driven'' story is that the inefficiencies caused by the distributed nature of the platform mandate using the flexibility of software components to more closely match the ``systems support'' to application requirements. This should buy us performance and scalability and we intend to do so without sacrificing the ``ease of use''.

The Beehive prototype is built on top of Solaris uni- and multi- processor boxes here in the HPPCE laboratory. The networks interconnecting them in the lab are Myrinet, ATM and High-speed Ethernet. Beehive relies on commodity hardware and software components and provides user-level systems support across the cluster for:

The compiler support for Beehive aims to provide the link between a shared memory programming paradigm and the Beehive API. The application domains we are currently looking at include: virtual environments, databases, interactive speech, web servers and certain scientific/engineering codes.

A writeup is available (PDF) explaining the architecture of Beehive.


Publications:


Contacts:

Send all correspondence regarding this page to Namgeun Jeong (namgeun@cc.gatech.edu)

Page Last Modified April 27, 2007