HPP: An architecture for high performance and utility computing

An architecture of high performance computer, called Hyper Parallel Processing (HPP), is proposed to satisfy the requirements of both High Performance Computing, and Utility Computing which will be the application model of data centers. HPP combines the benefits of the scalability of MPP, the communication efficiency of DSM, as well as the commodity of cluster. Comparisons of current main-stream high performance computer architectures show that none of them can satisfy both HPC and utility computing. The main features of HPP are Global Address Space (GAS) and Hyper Node with single Operating System image. HPP supports the distributed global address space including both memory and I/O, but without hardware cache coherence. A Hyper Node consists of a set of application specific CPUs and a (or more) OS specific CPU. The OS CPU maintains the single system image, while the application CPUs run only lightweight run-time software. Besides the GAS interconnect network for applications, a standard SAN connects all OS CPUs and I/O devices providing system management and storage service. HPP is able to provide many opportunities of innovative research in High Performance and Utility Computing areas, including communication, synchronization, programming model, node operating system, utility computing, fault isolation, CPU and system etc. According to HPP architecture, a prototype system of Dawning5000 HPC is implemented and the feasibility of HPP is proved.