SCALABLE, HIGHLY AVAILABLE CLUSTER MEMBERSHIP ARCHITECTURE

摘要

The invention comprises a software-based communications architecture (Figure 4) and associated software methods for establishing and maintaining a common membership among a cluster of multiple, cooperating computers (called hosts). The invention incorporates the use of nearest neighbor and overlapping heartbeat connections between clustered computers that are logically organized in a linear or multi-dimensional array. This membership architecture is well suited to distributed applications (such as partitioned database) in which changes to the workload are made and propagated cluster-wide by neighboring hosts for purposes of load-balancing.