Building Your Own Super Computer - Definitions and Benefits of Clustering

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Greg Pfister, in his wonderful book In Search of Clusters, defines a cluster as "a type of parallel or distributed system that: consists of a collection of interconnected whole computers, and is used as a single, unified computing resource".

Therefore, a cluster is a group of computers bound together into a common resource pool. A given task can be executed on all computers or on any specific computer in the cluster. Lets look into the benefits of clustering:

• Scientific applications: Enterprises running scientific applications on supercomputers can benefit from migrating to a more cost effective Linux cluster .
• Large ISPs and E-Commerce enterprises with a large database: Internet service providers or e-commerce web sites that require high availability and load balancing and scalability.
• Graphics rendering and animation: A Linux cluster has become important in the film industry for rendering quality graphics. In the movie Titanic, a Linux cluster was used to render the background in the ocean scenes. The same concept was used in the movies True Lies and Interview with the Vampire.

We can also characterize clusters by their function:

• Distributed processing cluster: Tasks (small piece of executable code) are broken down and worked on by many small systems rather than one large system, often deployed for a task previously handled by supercomputers. This type of cluster is very suitable for scientific or financial analysis.
• Fail-over clusters: Clusters are used to increase the availability and serviceability of network services. When an application or server fails, its services are migrated to another system. The identity of the failed system is also migrated. Failover servers are used for database servers, mail servers or file servers:
  
  
  
• High availability load balancing clusters: A given application can run on all computers and a given computer can host multiple applications. The “outside world” interacts with the cluster and individual computers are “hidden”. It supports large cluster pools and applications do not need to be specialized. High availability clustering works best with stateless application and those that can be run concurrently:
  
  

  

Next: Building Windows Clusters >>
 

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