Sidera: A cluster-based server for online analytical processing

Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) has become a primary component of today's pervasive Decision Support systems. The rich multi-dimensional analysis that OLAP provides allows corporate decision makers to more fully assess and evaluate organizational progress than ever before. However, as the data repositories upon which OLAP is based become larger and larger, single CPU OLAP servers are often stretched to, or even beyond, their limits. In this paper, we present a comprehensive architectural model for a fully parallelized OLAP server. Our multi-node platform actually consists of a series of largely independent sibling servers that are "glued" together with a lightweight MPI-based Parallel Service Interface (PSI). Physically, we target the commodity-oriented, "shared nothing" Linux cluster, a model that provides an extremely cost effective alterative to the "shared everything" commercial platforms often used in high-end database environments. Experimental results demonstrate both the viability and robustness of the design.