Software Architecture for Processing Clusters Based on I2O

Mainstream computing equipment and the advent of affordable multi-Gigabit communication technology permit us to address data acquisition and processing problems with clusters of COTS machinery. Such networks typically contain heterogeneous platforms, real-time partitions and even custom devices. Vital overall system requirements are high efficiency and flexibility. In preceding projects we experienced the difficulties to meet both requirements at once. Intelligent I/O (I₂O) is an industry specification that defines a uniform messaging format and execution environment for hardware and operating system independent device drivers in systems with processor based communication equipment. Mapping this concept to a distributed computing environment and encapsulating the details of the specification into an application-programming framework allow us to provide architectural support for (i) efficient and (ii) extensible cluster operation. This paper portrays our view of applying I₂O to high-performance clusters. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach and report on the efficiency of our XDAQ software framework for distributed data acquisition systems.