Evaluation of a cluster-based system for the OLTP application

In this paper, we have modeled and evaluated a new parallel processing syst em called Scalable Parallel computer Architecture based on Xbar (SPAX) for commercial applications. SMP systems are widely used as servers for commerc ial applications; however, they have very limited scalability. SPAX cost-ef fectively over comes the SMP limitation by providing both scalability and a pplication portability. To investigate whether the new architecture satisfi es the requirements of commercial applications, we have built a system mode l and a workload model. The results of the simulation study show that the I /O subsystem becomes the major bottleneck. We found that SPAX can still mee t the I/O requirement of the OLTP workload as it supports flexible I/O subs ystem. We also investigated what will be the next most important bottleneck in SPAX and how to remove it. We found that the newly developed system net work called Xcent-Net will not be a bottleneck in the I/O data path. We als o show the optimal configuration that is to be considered for system tuning .