International Business Machines Corporation

Arunachalam Ganapathy

Lance Warren Russell

Rajeev Kumar Mishra

Murali Vaddagiri

A gossiping scheme for sharing node status in a cluster of nodes provides a robust mechanism for determining node status within the cluster. Nodes transmit gossip messages to each other nodes, the gossip messages listing other nodes in the cluster that are operational. When a node does not receive a gossip message from a particular node within a predetermined time period, then the node transmits messages to the other nodes indicating that the particular node is down. However, if another node has received a packet from the particular node within the predetermined time period and receives the node down message, then the other node responds with a node alive message.

Inter-node communication scheme for sharing node operating status

Communication between clusters of processing nodes is initiated by designating a link layer address and a target node name in a remote cluster. The link layer address is transmitted to the target node via a regular network transmission. The link layer address is stored locally in each cluster and the nodes in each cluster are signaled that a configuration change has been made, so that gateway nodes in the clusters can obtain the link layer address to use for subsequent communications with the other cluster, such as event notifications of node status changes.

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Bengaluru, India

Arunachalam Ganapathy