Exam (elaborations) SYSTEM MODELING, CLUSTERING AND VIRTUALIZATION: 1.

 Billions of people use the Internet every day. As a result, supercomputer sites and large data centers must provide highperformance computing services to huge numbers of Internet users concurrently. Because of this high demand, the Linpack Benchmark for high-performance computing (HPC) applications is no longer optimal for measuring system performance.  The emergence of computing clouds instead demands highthroughput computing (HTC) systems built with parallel and distributed computing technologies . We have to upgrade data centers using fast servers, storage systems, and high- bandwidth networks. The purpose is to advance network-based computing and web services with the emerging new technologies. The Platform Evolution  Computer technology has gone through five generations of development, with each generation lasting from 10 to 20 years. Successive generations are overlapped in about 10 years. For instance, from 1950 to 1970, a handful of mainframes, including the IBM 360 and CDC 6400, were built to satisfy the demands of large businesses and government organizations. 3  From 1960 to 1980, lower-cost mini- computers such as the DEC PDP 11 and VAX Series became popular among small businesses and on college campuses.  From 1970 to 1990, we saw widespread use of personal computers built with VLSI microproces- sors. From 1980 to 2000, massive numbers of portable computers and pervasive devices appeared in both wired and wireless applications. Since 1990, the use of both HPC and HTC systems hidden in. Fig 1. Evolutionary trend toward parallel, distributed, and cloud computing with clusters, MPPs, P2P networks, grids, clouds, web services, and the Internet of Things. High-Performance Computing  For many years, HPC systems emphasize the raw speed performance. The speed of HPC systems has increased from Gflops in the early 1990s to now Pflops in 2010. This 4 improvement was driven mainly by the demands from scientific, engineering, and manufacturing communities.  For example,the Top 500 most powerful computer systems in the world are measured by floating-point speed in Linpack benchmark results. However, the number of supercomputer users is limited to less than 10% of all computer users.  Today, the majority of computer users are using desktop computers or large servers when they conduct Internet searches and market-driven computing tasks. High-Throughput Computing  The development of market-oriented high-end computing systems is undergoing a strategic change from an HPC paradigm to an HTC paradigm. This HTC paradigm pays more attention to high-flux computing.  The main application for high-flux computing is in Internet searches and web services by millions or more users simultaneously. The performance goal thus shifts to measure high throughput or the number of tasks completed per unit of time. HTC technology needs to not only improve in terms of batch processing speed, but also address the acute problems of cost, energy savings, security, and reliability at many data and enterprise computing centers. This book will address both HPC and HTC systems to meet the demands of all computer users. Three New Computing Paradigms  A Figure 1. illustrates, with the introduction of SOA, Web 2.0 services become available. Advances in virtualization make it possible to see the growth of Internet clouds as a new computing paradigm. The maturity of radio-frequency identification (RFID), Global Positioning System (GPS), and sensor technologies has triggered the develop