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Abstract : |
We developed a PC cluster system consists of 100 PCs. Each PC employs the 200MHz Pentium Pro CPU and is connected with others through an ATM switch. We picked up two kinds of data intensive applications. One is decision support query processing. And the other is data mining, specifically, association rule mining. As a high speed network, ATM technology has recently come to be a de facto standard. While other high performance network standards are also available, ATM networks are widely used from local area to widely distributed environments. One of the problems of the ATM networks is its high latencies, in contrast to their higher bandwidths. This is usually considered a serious flaw of ATM in composing high performance massively parallel processors. However, applications such as large scale database analyses are insensitive to the communication latency, requiring only the bandwidth. On the other hand, the performance of personal computers is increasing rapidly these days while the prices of PCs continue to fall at a much faster rate than workstations'. The 200MHz Pentium Pro CPU is competitive in integer performance to the processor chips found in workstations. Although it is still weak at floating point operations, they are not frequently used in database applications., |
