Scale-up x Scale-out: A Case Study using Nutch/Lucene

Scale-up solutions, in the form of large SMPs, have represented the mainstream of commercial computing for the past several years, with major server vendors providing increasingly larger and more powerful machines. More recently, scale-out solutions, in the form of clusters of smaler machines, have gained increased aceptance for commercial computing. Scale-out solutions are particularly effective in high-throughput web-centric applications. In this paper, we investigate the behavior of two competing approaches to parallelism, scale-up and scale-out, in an emerging search application. Our conclusions show that a scale-out strategy can be the key to good performance even on a scale-up machine. Furthermore, scale-out solutions offer better price/performance, although at an increase in management complexity.

By: Maged Michael, José E. Moreira, Doron Shiloach, Robert W. Wisniewski

Published in: RC24152 in 2007

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