ACS: Cost Effective System Design for Critical Application Availability

Abstract

Parallel and distributed computing technology is a need of the future. The commercially available systems are very expensive and complex and hence require regular maintenance. The aim of the proposed system is to focus on critical applications in the system so high availability can be provided instead of eliminating all potential SPOF (Single Point of Failure) in the system, as the cost is associated with the elimination of each potential SPOF in the system and this makes system unnecessarily complex and costly. Nowadays many universities are offering cluster computing courses at UG and PG level. They require a viable cluster system as an educational tool for teaching the course. Commercially available clustering systems are very expensive with much more functionality. Universities in developing countries cannot invest millions of dollars to buy such systems and cannot spend on its maintenance with its limited budget. This paper presents the cost-effective system design for improving the availability of applications by introducing an ACS (Application Cluster System) as an educational tool.