NLUUG en NLnet Voorjaarsconferentie

FMP, Functional MultiProcessing

Braun Brelin

This talk introduces a computer architecture that dramatically increases the performance and scalability of network file servers. It begins with a discussion of the I/O performance gap, a widespread Unix industry performance problem that has arisen because recent surges in workstation MIPS have not been balanced by similar increases in file server I/O capability. This seminar will explain how I/O bottlenecks can be removed using "Functional MultiProcessing" (FMP).

FMP is a multiprocessor server architecture that divorces the critical network, file and disk I/O functions from the Unix operating system and executes them instead on dedicated high-throughput I/O processors. Complete user-level transparency and compatibility are maintained by executing Unix on a separate, general-purpose, Sun-compliant, peer processor. Though an FMP server may incorporate symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) CPU's to speed compute-intensive applications, its architecture is fundamentally different from the conventional SMP architectures common in compute servers, mini-computers, and some traditional file servers. This seminar discusses the major hardware and software elements of the Auspex server's FMP architecture.

This seminar discusses FMP primarily in the context of NFS file service. Yet FMP readily incorporates computer server functionality, including SPARC-based SMP multiprocessor subsystems. For example, to increase database server performance, an SMP subsystem attached to the backplane of an FMP server can take advantage of the high-concurrency SCSI-disk-array-based storage subsystem.

Braun Brelin
Auspex Systems, Inc.
bbrelin@auspex.com