Collaborative Research: Design and Analysis of High-Performance, Energy-Efficient, and Secure Clusters

Supported by NSF CCF-0541384

Last Updated: January 31, 2007

Summary

Clusters have emerged as the most effective solution to design high performance servers, which are increasingly being deployed in supporting a wide variety of Web-based services. Along with high and predictable performance, optimization of energy consumption in these servers has become a serious concern due to their high power budgets. In addition, the critical nature of many Internet-based services mandate that these systems should be robust to attacks from the Internet, since numerous security loopholes of cluster servers come to the forefront. Therefore, design and analysis of high performance, energy-efficient and secure clusters is crucial for the next-generation cluster systems not only from academic and industrial standpoints but from socio-economic and environmental standpoints. Although some initial investigation on cluster energy consumption and security has appeared recently, an in-depth design and analysis of a cluster interconnect considering the three parameters above have not been undertaken. On the other hand, such an investigation is extremely challenging because there are numerous controllable factors across many dimensions and frequently these factors are conflicting.
The proposed research attempts to address three closed issues in a ground-up fashion starting from the basic cluster components to the entire system. First, design and analysis of a complete cluster interconnect or a system area network (SAN) will be conducted. The work will encompass the study of the recently proposed InfiniBand Architecture (IBA) framework. The interconnect fabric includes the switches, Network Interface Cards (NICs) or Host Channel Adaptors (HCAs), and various network topologies. Second, we will develop a framework to provide enhanced security in terms of confidentiality, integrity, and availability in clusters, considering all sources of vulnerabilities including operating system/software, communication hardware, user-level communication and network protocols. We will also propose a novel authentication mechanism with marginal performance overhead and no InfiniBand packet format change. Finally, we will investigate the adaptation of IBA in a cluster server and propose efficient memory management techniques and energy conservation schemes in a whole cluster system including disk systems, SANs and individual cluster nodes. A comprehensive simulation testbed will be developed to evaluate these design concepts along with real experiments. We will provide hierarchical analysis of cluster systems, thus enabling assessment of the effects of individual components such as disk subsystems and a cluster network. We are planning to design all components to be plugged into the simulation testbed to assess their impacts on performance, energy consumption, and security of the entire cluster system.

Publications

Ki Hwan Yum