Infiniband enables scalable Real Application Clusters – Update Spring 2008 Sumanta Chatterjee, Oracle Richard Frank, Oracle

What is Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) Database? Instance 1Instance 2Instance 3Instance 4 SGA 4SGA 1SGA 2SGA 3 Private Network Public Network to Grid Computing Nodes Database … Multiple Instances One Database SGA database memory of all instances aggregated and appears as one single database to applications through Cache Fusion.

RAC for SAP Benchmark Results Scalability

Advantages of RAC Performance Increase performance of a RAC database by adding additional servers to the cluster. Fault Tolerance A RAC database is made up of multiple instance. While performance may degrade, loss of an instance does not bring down the entire database. Scalability Scale a RAC database by adding instances to the cluster database.

Shifting Trend in Deployment Paradigm Monolithic SMP Application Database Database Tier Application Tier on Commodity servers Mixed Configuration Commodity Application Servers SMP Database Servers Application Tier on Commodity servers Database Tier on Commodity Servers Grid Computing All Commodity Servers PastPresentFuture Application and Database on Same SMP Server

Commodity Cluster Requires Unified Fabric for efficient scalable IPC + Storage I/O RDS / IB shows significant real world application performance gains 50% less CPU than IP over IB, UDP ½ latency of UDP (no user-mode acks) 50% faster cache to cache Oracle block throughput (ping) Scales well beyond GE (600+ mbytes – ran out of CPU) Minimal Oracle code change Supports fail-over across and within HCAs Certified for 16 nodes (64 processors) GA in 10g r2 ( ).

Current Status Several TPC-H benchmarks with RDS and SRP Large scale deployments at several Oracle customer sites. Many pilot projects are in progress. Folks waiting for RDS on OFED 16 nodes Oracle 11G RAC certification of OFED submitted for audit Voltaire and Qlogic have completed platform certification. Audit in progress. Certification on Unix in progress

RDS- Communication model Works well with existing IPC clients— Parallel Query communications Buffer cache fusion Working on providing support for additional clients with RDMA plus atomic operations We expect significant performance improvements with RDMA With Atomics, even greater scalabilities and performance can be gained. Incentives for simple NICs to add RDMA + Atomics

RDS - evolution RDS v2 with b-copy send, rev in OFED New features in RDS v3 available in OFED 1.3 supports RDMA read + RDMA write Introduces cmsgs for asynchronous operation submit and completion notifications Large data transfers – presently up to 1 MB. Will go up to 8 MB

RDS v4 Plans for RDS v4 Masked fetch_and_add Masked compare_and_swap Zero copy completions via cmsg RDS V4 will also be more portable - we will work to abstract out the generic RDS operations from O/S primitive support and network operations. A platform that provides the O/S + network primitives library - should be able to take all the generic RDS code - as is.

RDS Compatibility Linux: request to all IB vendors— Please ensure compatibility across HCAs, switches Ideally RDS driver in OFED ported to all platforms Advantages include: One code body– wider testing Interoperability across platforms Towards this end, we plan to: Abstract RDS protocol driver generically (OS, RDMA)