16.8. Using High-Speed Interconnects with MySQL Cluster
Even before design of NDB Cluster began in
1996, it was evident that one of the major problems to be
encountered in building parallel databases would be communication
between the nodes in the network. For this reason, NDB
Cluster was designed from the very beginning to allow
for the use of a number of different data transport mechanisms. In
this Manual, we use the term transporter
for these.
Currently, the MySQL Cluster codebase includes support for four
different transporters. Most users today employ TCP/IP over
Ethernet because it is ubiquitous. TCP/IP is also by far the
best-tested transporter in MySQL Cluster.
We are working to make sure that communication with the
ndbd process is made in “chunks”
that are as large as possible because this benefits all types of
data transmission.
For users who desire it, it is also possible to use cluster
interconnects to enhance performance even further. There are two
ways to achieve this: Either a custom transporter can be designed
to handle this case, or you can use socket implementations that
bypass the TCP/IP stack to one extent or another. We have
experimented with both of these techniques using the SCI (Scalable
Coherent Interface) technology developed by
Dolphin.
