🚀 go-pugleaf

/usr/group/chicago
March General Meeting Announcement

March 18, 1992
7:00 p.m.
Sheraton Inn Naperville
1801 N. Naper Boulevard (Naperville Road)
Naperville, Illinois

In March, /usr/group/chicago will have a special privilege in welcoming
Dr. Bruce Nelson, the Director of Technology at Auspex Systems, in Santa
Clara, California.

His will speak to us on:

An Assymetric Multiprocessor Architecture
for Extremely High-Performance Systems
(or, How To Make RISC Workstations Run Faster by Removing Bottlenecks)

Following is an abstract of the talk:

The power of existing NFS file servers has not kept pace with
increasing workstation performance because it is much easier to shrink
a RISC microprocessor die than it is to spin up a magnetic disk
platter.  As a direct result, many users are unable to tap the full
power of their server-choked workstations.  This server shortfall is
intensified by the NFS protocol which, while simple and stateless, is
neither sophisticated nor optimal.  Furthermore, mere MIPS alone do not
yield excellent I/O capability.  This makes it challenging to build
exceptional-performance NFS servers, especially in an ares where FDDI
may be too little, too late, and HIPPI-class bandwidths are desired
for some applications.

In research environments, the resulting opportunity is to define and
refine new file systems -- such as Andrew and Sprite -- that use better
protocols and semantics.  Compatibility is not a priority.  In the
commercial realm, where 2,200,000 NFS clients demand service,
one opportunity is to reimplement the NFS specification for
performance and stability.  Precise NFS compatibility is crucial
until there is a clear and widely accepted migration path to the
post-NFS world  (e.g., slow migration to DCE and DCE-DFS).

Auspex builds a network server that factors protocol, file, and
storage processing out of Unix and executes these functions instead on
dedicated 32-bit processors.  Network processors support two Ethernets
at full bandwidth and perform protocol processing through the NFS
level.  File processors run the raw 4.3 BSD file system unencumbered by
context switching.  Each storage processor controls ten fully
concurrent, latency-optimized SCSI channels that run mirrored,
striped, spanned and/or write-accelerated disk arrays.  A spearate
Sun3- or Sun4-compatible Unix host processor performs housekeeping and
utility functions, but never touches (i.e., slows down) NFS requests.
The Sun4 SPARC host processor provides a good balance of computing and
I/O capabilities.

This talk explores Auspex's explicitly asymmetric "functional
multiprocessor" architecture (which bucks the trend of most
workstation vendors and their symmetric servers) in detail.  It
investigates SCSI and IPI disk characteristics and shows, both
analytically and empitically, that SCSI is better than IPI for NFS
service.  It discusses how Auspex benchmarks a full 10-processor,
80-GB, eight-Ethernet server configuration.  It explains how we
achieved our 1,300 average-mix NFS IOPS (I/O operations per second)
rate.  At an aggregate file-transfer bandwidth of 70 Mb/s, or 88% of
eight simultaneous Ethernets, the Auspex machines have 4-6 times the
throughput of conventional NFS file servers, even when enhanced with
third-party disk and network accelerators.

The talk concludes with a brief technical case study selected from the
over 300 NetServers in production use.  The study is Adobe Systems,
home of Postscript.  Adobe's dual NS 5000 configuration has 8 & 8
Ethernets, 56 & 45 GB of disk, 50+ diskless clients, and over 200 more
DEC, Next, and Sun dataless workstations.

About our speaker:

Bruce Nelson has had broad software engineering experience with computer
systems and networks.  Between 1977 and 1982, Nelson was on the research
staff of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where he did
pioneering work on distributed computing systems.  He implemented the
first and fastest remote procedure call (RPC) compilers (concepts now
openly promulgated by Sun as ONC/RPC and OSF as DCE/RPC), developed
and demonstrated practical optimization techniques for network
protocol software, and build performance monitors for network file
servers.  Since PARC, Nelson has worked for both semiconductor and
workstation companies, giving him a cross-spectrum understanding of
computer system issues.  He joined Auspex in 1989, where he is
responsible for product planning, benchmark methodology, and
technology forecasting.  Nelson received his MS in computer science
from Stanford University and his PhD (also in computer science) from
Carnegie-Mellon University.

Getting to the meeting:

>From Chicago, take Interstate 88 west to the Naperville Road exit.
At the light, turn right.  The next light will be Diehl Road.
Turn right again.  The Sheraton will be on the right.

Hope to see you there!