| Abstract: | In this paper, we have modeled and evaluated a new parallel processing system called Scalable Parallel computer Architecture based on Xbar (SPAX) for commercial applications. SMP systems are widely used as servers for commercial applications; however, they have very limited scalability. SPAX costeffectively overcomes the SMP limitation by providing both scalability and application portability. To investigate whether the new architecture satisfies the requirements of commercial applications, we have built a system model 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 meet the I/O requirement of the OLTP workload as it supports flexible I/O subsystem. 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 network called Xcent-Net will not be a bottleneck in the I/O data path. We also show the optimal configuration that is to be considered for system tuning. |
