1. Asma Ounnas, Bilel Remmache, Tom Davis and Toby Weiss
Windows Clusters
Asma Ounnas, Bilel Remmache, Tom Davis and Toby Weiss

2. Introduction What are Windows Clusters
Network Load Balancing Clusters
Component Load Balancing Clusters
Server Clusters
Microsoft Windows Clustering Services (MSCS)
NT, 2000 and 2003
Cluster Membership and Resource Management
Applications supporting MSCS
Alternatives to Windows Clustering
High Performance computing
Research Directions in Windows Clustering
High Performance Computing
TerraServers
Image Clustering

3. What are Windows Clusters?
A collection of Windows Servers working together.
Three clustering technologies exist:
Network Load Balancing Clusters
Component Load Balancing Clusters
Server Clusters

4. What are Windows Clusters?
Network Load Balancing Clusters
The Network Load Balancing (NLB) service enhances the availability and scalability of Internet server applications
These include: Web, FTP, firewall, proxy and VPN servers - any applications which communicate using the TCP/IP or UDP protocols
Each host runs separate copies of the Web Server Application
Client requests are distributed across hosts in a cluster
If a host goes offline for any reason, requests are automatically redistributed amongst remaining hosts – providing redundancy
For increased user capacity and fault tolerance, additional servers can be added at any time, allowing the Web applications to be distributed further

5. What are Windows Clusters?
Network Load Balancing Clusters
Two connected NLB Clusters – to interlink distributed Firewalls and Web Servers
Taken from:
/proddocs/en-us/Default.asp?url=/resources/documentation/WindowsServ/2003/standard
/proddocs/en-us/NLB_key_features.asp

6. What are Windows Clusters?
2. Component Load Balancing Clusters
This feature of Microsoft Application Center 2000 allows COM+ applications to be distributed across multiple servers
The main purpose of this cluster type is for distributing servers for large web-site applications usually involving both a Web Tier (to provide web page layouts etc) and a Business Logic Tier (e.g. providing a connection to a database server)
This provides:
Manageability – Single unified content management system, for content distributed across clusters, remote administration
Scalability – Easy to cope with changing throughput needs
Availability – No single point of failure – redundant web-sites

7. What are Windows Clusters?
3. Server Clusters
“A server cluster is a group of independent computer systems, known as nodes, working together as a single system to ensure that critical applications and resources remain available to clients”[1]
They provide high-availability application support for distributed servers such as Database servers (such as MS SQL), Collaboration servers (such as Exchange) and Infrastructure servers (such as file and print servers)
Every node may be attached to one or more cluster storage devices
Clusters can be setup, configured and managed remotely using specialised Administrative software
[1]: Microsoft Windows Server System – Server cluster overview – 2004 – Available from the World Wide Web:
/standard/proddocs/en-us/Default.asp?url=/resources/documentation/WindowsServ/2003/
standard/proddocs/en-us/cs_about_3jub.asp

8. What are Windows Clusters?
3. Server Clusters (Continued…)
Clustering software is used to control communication between nodes. It manages communication to control resource management and also controls cluster activity, communication between cluster nodes, and failure operations.
Administrative Software allows configuration, control and monitoring of clusters and the nodes within them

9. What are Windows Clusters?
3. Server Clusters (Continued…)
Server Clusters Example Diagram [1]

10. Microsoft Cluster Service
MSCS (Microsoft Cluster Service)
First shipped with Windows NT Server Enterprise Edition (1997)
Later upgraded in Windows 2000 Advanced Server and Windows Server 2003

11. Microsoft Cluster Service
MSCS Terminology
Node
Resource
Group
Quorum resource
Virtual Server
Heartbeats

12. Microsoft Cluster Service
Windows NT Clusters
Cannot have more than two nodes
Nodes, groups, and resources

13. Microsoft Cluster Service
Win 2000 Vs Win 2003 MSCS
Windows 2000 Server:
Advanced Server: 2 nodes
Datacenter Server: up to 4 nodes
Support for geographically dispersed nodes
Windows 2003 Server:
Up to 8 nodes in both Advanced and Datacenter
Support for N+I configurations and 64-bit Processors
Majority Node Set

14. Microsoft Cluster Service
How do MSCS work?
MSCS deals with:
Cluster membership activities
Resource management (and failure handling)
Application state failover
Cluster management

15. State transition diagram for cluster membership
Microsoft Cluster Service
Cluster Membership
State transition diagram for cluster membership

16. Microsoft Cluster Service
Resource Management
Resource Control Libraries map to different resources
A resource can be:
Offline
Online pending
Online
Offline pending
Failed
Failed resources are recovered

17. MSCS Supported Applications
Microsoft Cluster Service
MSCS Supported Applications
Microsoft SQL Server
Oracle Database Server
SAP R/3
Microsoft Exchange
Microsoft Internet Security
But not many more!

18. Windows Vs. Other Systems
Windows provides support for High Availability (HA):
Network load balancing
Failover and redundancy
But there is another kind of clustering . . .

19. Windows Vs. Other Systems
High Performance Computing
Currently Windows has no built-in support for this.
Several different cluster models exist:
Beowulf
Single System Image

20. Windows Vs. Other Systems
Beowulf Clusters
“Beowulf Clusters are scalable performance clusters based on commodity hardware, on a private system network, with open source software (Linux) infrastructure.”

21. Windows Vs. Other Systems
Beowulf Clusters (Continued…)
How does they work?
PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine)
Allows network of computers to appear as one concurrent computational resource
MPI (Message Passing Interface)
Goal to develop a standard for message passing programs.

22. Windows Vs. Other Systems
Single-System Image Clusters
Single-system image (SSI) involves making a distributed system appear as a single system to the user.
openMosix:
Supports transparent migration of processes
Software does not need to be rewritten to take advantage of cluster
Achieves automatic load balancing

23. Windows Vs. Other Systems
Windows HPC
Although Microsoft do not provide direct Windows support for HPC clusters:
There is research going on into this
Third parties provide their own MPI libraries for Windows
Southampton HPC Centre:

24. Research Directions Research Directions
High-Performance Computing: WMPI II
TerraServers
Image Clustering:
ImageSeer: Clustering and Searching WWW Images
Locality Preserving Clustering for Image Database

25. High-Performance Computing:WMPI II
Research Directions
High-Performance Computing:WMPI II
Southampton HPC Centre
Critical Software specialise in creating High Performance Computing (HPC) middleware.
WMPI II™: is the high-end member of Critical Software's line of middleware products for HPC clusters providing a comprehensive MPI- 2 standard implementation: version 2.0 of MPI-2.
WMPI II is widely used in industrial applications: Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), Finite Element Analysis (FEA) and by academia for research and development programmes and for educational purposes.
WMPI II is free to download and evaluate!

26. High-Performance Computing: WMPI II(Cont)
Research Directions
High-Performance Computing: WMPI II(Cont)
Performance
Reliability
Thread safety
Full MPI-2 standard compliance
Support for 3rd party tools (debugger and profiler)
Large Platform support (Windows platforms and Linux-distributions)
Commitment for continues product evolution (to meet evolving market needs)
Integration and embedded support (OEMs)
Professional technical support
Scalability, up to > 1000 processors without any architectural limitation

27. High-Performance Computing: WMPI II(Cont) 2
Research Directions
High-Performance Computing: WMPI II(Cont) 2

28. Research Directions 2. TerraServers
Microsoft® TerraServer displays (stores) aerial, satellite, and topographic images of the earth in a SQL database available via the Internet,
One of the most popular online atlases: 22 terabytes of image data from the US Geological Survey (USGS).
Initially deployed in 1998.
The system demonstrated the scalability of PC hardware and software – Windows and SQL Server – on a single, mainframe-class processor.
In September 2000, the back-end database application was migrated to 4-node active/passive cluster connected to an 18 terabyte Storage Area Network (SAN). The new configuration was designed to achieve 99.99% availability for the back-end application.

29. TerraServer Installation Photograph
Research Directions
TerraServer Installation Photograph

30. 2. TerraServers (Cluster-SAN)
Research Directions
2. TerraServers (Cluster-SAN)
Storage Area Networks: simplified the wiring between nodes and disk resources and had good management tools => became the preferred processor-storage inter-connection mechanism
3 years of operation
The hardware and software components of the TerraServer Cluster and SAN: reliable, easy to operate when no changes are needed
Both high-traffic web server and a high traffic web service

31. TerraServer SAN Cluster Block Diagram
Research Directions
Windows Clusters
TerraServer SAN Cluster Block Diagram

32. Research Directions 2. TerraServers (Cont)
TerraServer failed to achieve four nines of availability – 99.99%. The vast majority of the downtime was due to operations mistakes that could have been avoided with improved procedures.
2004: SAN cluster replaced with a duplexed set of “white-box” PCs containing arrays of large, low-cost, Serial ATA disks: TerraServer Bricks – A High Availability Cluster Alternative
The goal is to operate the popular TerraServer web site with the same or higher availability than the TerraServer SAN at a fraction of the system and operations cost.
Improving resolution to 0.5 m.

33. TerraServer Brick architecture
Research Directions
TerraServer Brick architecture
The TerraServer web site is composed of:
A redundant farm of web bricks,
A mirrored array of storage bricks,
A redundant LAN linking the web and storage bricks,
A remote IP keyboard video, mouse (KVM) switch,
And, remote IP power distribution units (PDU).

34. TerraServer Brick architecture
Research Directions
TerraServer Brick architecture

35. Research Directions 3. Image Clustering
Image clustering is a technique that helps searching and browsing image repositories in several ways, including image data preprocessing, user interface designing, and search result representation.
ImageSeer: Clustering and Searching WWW Images
Locality Preserving Clustering for Image Database

36. Research Directions 3.1 ImageSeer system
Microsoft Research Asia (Beijing, China) and DCS University of Chicago
ImageSeer is a web image search engine:
Using a vision based page segmentation algorithm, a web page is partitioned into blocks
The textual and link information of an image can be accurately extracted within the block containing that image
The textual information is used for image representation
By extracting the page-to-block, block-to-image, block-to-page relationships through link structure and page layout analysis, an image graph is constructed
With the graph models, techniques used from spectral graph theory and Markov Chain theory for image ranking, clustering and embedding

37. Figure 4. Design of WWW image search system
Research Directions
Figure 4. Design of WWW image search system

38. 3.1 Locality Preserving Clustering for Image Database
Research Directions
3.1 Locality Preserving Clustering for Image Database
Spectral clustering method has been one of the most promising clustering methods in the last few years, because it can cluster data with complex structure, and the (near) global optimum is guaranteed.
Existing spectral clustering algorithms: difficult to handle data points out of training set (Normalized Cut, direct Kmeans, PCA+Kmeans)
Locality Preserving Clustering (LPC):
Shares many of the data representation properties of nonlinear spectral method
Provides an explicit mapping function which is defined everywhere, both on training data points and testing points.

39. Windows Clusters Summary What are Windows Clusters
Network Load Balancing Clusters
Component Load Balancing Clusters
Server Clusters
Microsoft Windows Clustering Services (MSCS)
NT, 2000 and 2003
Cluster Membership and Resource Management
Applications supporting MSCS
Alternatives to Windows Clustering
High Performance computing
Research Directions in Windows Clustering
High Performance Computing
TerraServers
Image Clustering

40. Windows Clusters
Questions?