Load balancing driver Designed a dynamic load balancing pseudo interface layered over several physical networking interfaces. The goal was to plug the server interfaces into an ethernet switch and have the load redirected as it moves. A coworker was inspired by the idea and has implemented it. It will ship with IRIX 6.5. The servers provide scalable and fault resistant NFS, database, and compute platforms.
Performance scales linearly with the number of server nodes and ethernet connections.
A system architecture effort, requiring the design of both hardware and software interfaces. The project was done on a low budget, requiring minimal changes to existing systems. The etherswitch is a crossbar switch with cut-through routing for high performance, and buffering in case of collisions. Like an Auspex file server, each external connection leading from the etherswitch to client machines is on a separate IP subnet. Modifications and enhancements had to be made to several parts of the system to improve the system administration, networking, and IO performance.