An Aiyara cluster is a low-powered computer cluster specially designed to process Big Data. The Aiyara cluster model can be considered as a specialization of the

Beowulf cluster A Beowulf cluster is a computer cluster of what are normally identical, commodity-grade computers networked into a small local area network with libraries and programs installed which allow processing to be shared among them. The result is a hi ...

in the sense that Aiyara is also built from commodity hardware, not inexpensive

personal computer A personal computer (PC) is a multi-purpose microcomputer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. Personal computers are intended to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert or tec ...

s, but system-on-chip computer boards. Unlike Beowulf, applications of an Aiyara cluster are scoped only for the Big Data area, not for scientific

high-performance computing High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into a mult ...

. Another important property of an Aiyara cluster is that it is low-power. It must be built with a class of processing units that produces less heat. The name Aiyara originally referred to the first

ARM In human anatomy, the arm refers to the upper limb in common usage, although academically the term specifically means the upper arm between the glenohumeral joint (shoulder joint) and the elbow joint. The distal part of the upper limb between th ...

-based cluster built by Wichai Srisuruk and Chanwit Kaewkasi at Suranaree University of Technology. The name "Aiyara" came from a

Thai Thai or THAI may refer to: * Of or from Thailand, a country in Southeast Asia ** Thai people, the dominant ethnic group of Thailand ** Thai language, a Tai-Kadai language spoken mainly in and around Thailand *** Thai script *** Thai (Unicode block ...

word literally an

elephant Elephants are the largest existing land animals. Three living species are currently recognised: the African bush elephant, the African forest elephant, and the Asian elephant. They are the only surviving members of the family Elephantidae ...

to reflect its underneath software stack, which is Apache Hadoop. Like Beowulf, an Aiyara cluster does not define a particular software stack to run atop it. A cluster normally runs a variant of the

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

operating system. Commonly used Big Data software stacks are Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark.

Development

A report of the Aiyara hardware which successfully processed a non-trivial amount of Big Data was published in the Proceedings of ICSEC 2014. Aiyara Mk-I, the second Aiyara cluster, consists of 22

Cubieboard Cubieboard is a single-board computer, made in Zhuhai, Guangdong, China. The first short run of prototype boards were sold internationally in September 2012, and the production version started to be sold in October 2012. It can run Android 4 ICS ...

s. It is the first known SoC-based ARM cluster which is able to process Big Data successfully using the Spark and

HDFS Apache Hadoop () is a collection of open-source software utilities that facilitates using a network of many computers to solve problems involving massive amounts of data and computation. It provides a software framework for distributed storage ...

stack. The Aiyara cluster model, a technical description explaining how to build an Aiyara cluster, was later published by Chanwit Kaewkasi in the DZone's 2014 Big Data Guide. The further results and cluster optimization techniques, that make the cluster's processing rate boost to 0.9 GB/min while still preserve low-power consumption, were reported in the Proceeding of IEEE's TENCON 2014.C. Kaewkasi and W. Srisuruk.
Optimizing performance and power consumption for an ARM-based big data cluster
'. Proceedings of the 2014 IEEE Region 10 Conference, 2014, pp. 1-6

References

{{Parallel Computing Cluster computing Parallel computing

Development

See also

References