Distributed database, many lightly loaded nodes

Question

I'm working on a hobby project involving a rather CPU-intensive calculation. The problem is embarrassingly parallel. This calculation will need to happen on a large number of nodes (say 1000-10000). Each node can do its work almost completely independently of the others. However, the entire system will need to answer queries from outside the system. Approximately 100000 such queries per second will have to be answered. To answer the queries, the system needs some state that is sometimes shared between two nodes. The nodes need at most 128MB RAM for their calculations.

Obviously, I'm probably not going to afford to actually build this system in the scale described above, but I'm still interested in the engineering challenge of it, and thought I'd set up a small number of nodes as proof-of-concept.

I was thinking about using something like Cassandra and CouchDB to have scalable persistent state across all nodes. If I run a distributed database server on each node, it would be very lightly loaded, but it would be very nice from an ops perspective to have all nodes be identical.

Now to my question:

Can anyone suggest a distributed database implementation that would be a good fit for a cluster of a large number of nodes, each with very little RAM?

Cassandra seems to do what I want, but http://wiki.apache.org/cassandra/CassandraHardware talks about recommending at least 4G RAM for each node.

I haven't found a figure for the memory requirements of CouchDB, but given that it is implemented in Erlang, I figure maybe it isn't so bad?

Anyway, recommendation, hints, suggestions, opinions are welcome!

Answer 1

You should be able to do this with cassandra, though depending on your reliability requirements, an in memory database like redis might be more appropriate.

Since the data set is so small (100 MBs of data), you should be able to run with less than 4GB of ram per node. Adding in cassandra overhead you probably need 200MB of ram for the memtable, and another 200MB of ram for the row cache (to cache the entire data set, turn off the key cache), plus another 500MB of ram for java in general, which means you could get away with 2 gigs of ram per machine.

Using a replication factor of three, you probably only need a cluster on the order of 10's of nodes to serve the number of reads/writes you require (especially since your data set is so small and all reads can be served from the row cache). If you need the computing power of 1000's of nodes, have them talk to the 10's of cassandra nodes storing you data rather than try to split cassandra to run across 1000's of nodes.

Answer 2

I've not used CouchDB myself, but I am told that Couch will run in as little as 256M with around 500K records. At a guess that would mean that each of your nodes might need ~512M, taking into account the extra 128M they need for their calculations. Ultimately you should download and give each a test inside a VPS, but it does sound like Couch will run in less memory than Cassandra.