Distributed Setup

In order to test distributed operation of GDSTILE we assembled some available machines. The master is a two processor Sun Blade loaded with 8 GB of RAM. Slaves include: a Sparc 10 running Solaris 8, a single processor Pentium running Linux (Red Hat R9) and a dual Xeon running Linux (Red Hat R9.)

Notes:

Common Storage Area - the stripe data coming from the master is written to a directory which must be available to all slaves. This is typically done through NFS but any file sharing protocol that all machines support can be used. The input file and output files need not go to the common area.

RPC - the master and slaves communicate via RPC (remote procedure calls). A daemon, RGDSTILE, must be installed and running on each slave. RGDSTILE must run under a common user name on all machines (this is a security issue.) For example, if GDSTILE on the master runs as user antonio, then all slaves must have a user, antonio, and the daemon RGDSTILE must run as user antonio.

Server List - the master (or client) reads a file called server.lst that lists the available slaves (servers) and which specifies how each server is configured and what that server's priority should be.

Memory Requirements - because the master must load the GDSII file into memory it should be equipped with enough RAM to completely load the file. This may require mutltiple GB of RAM. The slaves only need a few hundred MB of RAM since each stripe typically varies in size from 20MB to 200 MB depending on the stripe's width, height and density.