In this section, we show how to adapt a cluster configured for normal TCP/IP communication to use SCI Sockets instead. This documentation is based on SCI Sockets version 2.3.0 as of 01 October 2004.

Prerequisites.  Any machines with which you wish to use SCI Sockets must be equipped with SCI cards.

No special builds (other than the -max builds) are needed for SCI Sockets because it uses normal TCP/IP socket calls which are already available in MySQL Cluster. However, SCI Sockets are currently supported only on the Linux 2.4 and 2.6 kernels. For other operating systems, you can use SCI Transporters, but this requires that the server be built using --with-ndb-sci=/opt/DIS.

Prior to MySQL 5.1.20, there were issues with building MySQL Cluster with SCI support (see Bug#25470), but these have been resolved due to work contributed by Dolphin International. SCI Sockets are now correctly supported for MySQL Cluster using the -max builds, and versions of MySQL Cluster with SCI Transporter support can be built using either of compile-amd64-max-sci or compile-pentium64-max-sci. Both of these build scripts can be found in the BUILD directory of the MySQL 5.1 source; it should not be difficult to adapt them for other platforms.

There are essentially four requirements for SCI Sockets:

This process needs to be repeated for each machine in the cluster where you plan to use SCI Sockets for inter-node communication.

Two packages need to be retrieved to get SCI Sockets working:

Currently, these are available only in source code format. The latest versions of these packages at the time of this writing were available as (respectively) DIS_GPL_2_5_0_SEP_10_2004.tar.gz and SCI_SOCKET_2_3_0_OKT_01_2004.tar.gz. You should be able to find these (or possibly newer versions) at http://www.dolphinics.com/support/downloads.html.

Package Installation.  Once you have obtained the library packages, the next step is to unpack them into appropriate directories, with the SCI Sockets library unpacked into a directory below the DIS code. Next, you need to build the libraries. This example shows the commands used on Linux/x86 to perform this task:

shell> tar xzf DIS_GPL_2_5_0_SEP_10_2004.tar.gz
shell> cd DIS_GPL_2_5_0_SEP_10_2004/src/
shell> tar xzf ../../SCI_SOCKET_2_3_0_OKT_01_2004.tar.gz
shell> cd ../adm/bin/Linux_pkgs
shell> ./make_PSB_66_release

It is possible to build these libraries for some 64-bit processors. To build the libraries for Opteron CPUs using the 64-bit extensions, run make_PSB_66_X86_64_release rather than make_PSB_66_release. If the build is made on an Itanium machine, you should use make_PSB_66_IA64_release. The X86-64 variant should work for Intel EM64T architectures but this has not yet (to our knowledge) been tested.

Once the build process is complete, the compiled libraries will be found in a zipped tar file with a name along the lines of DIS-<operating-system>-time-date. It is now time to install the package in the proper place. In this example we will place the installation in /opt/DIS. You most likely need to run the following as the system root user.

shell> cp DIS_Linux_2.4.20-8_181004.tar.gz /opt/
shell> cd /opt
shell> tar xzf DIS_Linux_2.4.20-8_181004.tar.gz
shell> mv DIS_Linux_2.4.20-8_181004 DIS

Network configuration.  Now that all the libraries and binaries are in their proper place, we need to ensure that the SCI cards have proper node IDs within the SCI address space.

It is also necessary to decide on the network structure before proceeding. There are three types of network structures which can be used in this context:

Each of these topologies has its own method for providing node IDs. We discuss each of them in brief.

A simple ring uses node IDs which are non-zero multiples of 4: 4, 8, 12,...

The next possibility uses SCI switches. An SCI switch has 8 ports, each of which can support a ring. It is necessary to make sure that different rings use different node ID spaces. In a typical configuration, the first port uses node IDs below 64 (4 – 60), the next 64 node IDs (68 – 124) are assigned to the next port, and so on, with node IDs 452 – 508 being assigned to the eighth port.

Two- and three-dimensional torus network structures take into account where each node is located in each dimension, incrementing by 4 for each node in the first dimension, by 64 in the second dimension, and (where applicable) by 1024 in the third dimension. See Dolphin's Web site for more thorough documentation.

In our testing we have used switches, although most large cluster installations use 2- or 3-dimensional torus structures. The advantage provided by switches is that, with dual SCI cards and dual switches, it is possible to build with relative ease a redundant network where the average failover time on the SCI network is on the order of 100 microseconds. This is supported by the SCI transporter in MySQL Cluster and is also under development for the SCI Socket implementation.

Failover for the 2D/3D torus is also possible but requires sending out new routing indexes to all nodes. However, this requires only 100 milliseconds or so to complete and should be acceptable for most high-availability cases.

By placing cluster data nodes properly within the switched architecture, it is possible to use 2 switches to build a structure whereby 16 computers can be interconnected and no single failure can hinder more than one of them. With 32 computers and 2 switches it is possible to configure the cluster in such a manner that no single failure can cause the loss of more than two nodes; in this case, it is also possible to know which pair of nodes is affected. Thus, by placing the two nodes in separate node groups, it is possible to build a “safe” MySQL Cluster installation.

To set the node ID for an SCI card use the following command in the /opt/DIS/sbin directory. In this example, -c 1 refers to the number of the SCI card (this is always 1 if there is only 1 card in the machine); -a 0 refers to adapter 0; and 68 is the node ID:

shell> ./sciconfig -c 1 -a 0 -n 68

If you have multiple SCI cards in the same machine, you can determine which card has which slot by issuing the following command (again we assume that the current working directory is /opt/DIS/sbin):

shell> ./sciconfig -c 1 -gsn

This will give you the SCI card's serial number. Then repeat this procedure with -c 2, and so on, for each card in the machine. Once you have matched each card with a slot, you can set node IDs for all cards.

After the necessary libraries and binaries are installed, and the SCI node IDs are set, the next step is to set up the mapping from hostnames (or IP addresses) to SCI node IDs. This is done in the SCI sockets configuration file, which should be saved as /etc/sci/scisock.conf. In this file, each SCI node ID is mapped through the proper SCI card to the hostname or IP address that it is to communicate with. Here is a very simple example of such a configuration file:

#host           #nodeId
alpha           8
beta            12
192.168.10.20   16

It is also possible to limit the configuration so that it applies only to a subset of the available ports for these hosts. An additional configuration file /etc/sci/scisock_opt.conf can be used to accomplish this, as shown here:

#-key                        -type        -values
EnablePortsByDefault                yes
EnablePort                  tcp           2200
DisablePort                 tcp           2201
EnablePortRange             tcp           2202 2219
DisablePortRange            tcp           2220 2231

Driver installation.  With the configuration files in place, the drivers can be installed.

First, the low-level drivers and then the SCI socket driver need to be installed:

shell> cd DIS/sbin/
shell> ./drv-install add PSB66
shell> ./scisocket-install add

If desired, the installation can be checked by invoking a script which verifies that all nodes in the SCI socket configuration files are accessible:

shell> cd /opt/DIS/sbin/
shell> ./status.sh

If you discover an error and need to change the SCI socket configuration, it is necessary to use ksocketconfig to accomplish this task:

shell> cd /opt/DIS/util
shell> ./ksocketconfig -f

For more information about ksocketconfig, consult the documentation available from http://www.dolphinics.com/support/documentation.html.

Testing the setup.  To ensure that SCI sockets are actually being used, you can employ the latency_bench test program. Using this utility's server component, clients can connect to the server to test the latency of the connection. Determining whether SCI is enabled should be fairly simple from observing the latency.

To set up a server, use the following:

shell> cd /opt/DIS/bin/socket
shell> ./latency_bench -server

To run a client, use latency_bench again, except this time with the -client option:

shell> cd /opt/DIS/bin/socket
shell> ./latency_bench -client server_hostname

SCI socket configuration should now be complete and MySQL Cluster ready to use both SCI Sockets and the SCI transporter (see Section 20.3.4.10, “SCI Transport Connections”).

Starting the cluster.  The next step in the process is to start MySQL Cluster. To enable usage of SCI Sockets it is necessary to set the environment variable LD_PRELOAD before starting ndbd, mysqld, and ndb_mgmd. This variable should point to the kernel library for SCI Sockets.

To start ndbd in a bash shell, do the following:

bash-shell> export LD_PRELOAD=/opt/DIS/lib/libkscisock.so
bash-shell> ndbd

In a tcsh environment the same thing can be accomplished with:

tcsh-shell> setenv LD_PRELOAD=/opt/DIS/lib/libkscisock.so
tcsh-shell> ndbd