An example of a Computer cluster

A computer cluster is a group of tightly coupled computers that work together closely so that in many respects they can be viewed as though they are a single computer. The components of a cluster are commonly, but not always, connected to each other through fast local area networks. Clusters are usually deployed to improve performance and/or availability over that provided by a single computer, while typically being much more cost-effective than single computers of comparable speed or availability.^[1] Image File history File links Us-nasa-columbia. ... Image File history File links Us-nasa-columbia. ... The NASA Columbia Supercomputer. ... Local area network scheme A local area network (LAN) is a computer network covering a small geographic area, like a home, office, or group of buildings. ...

Cluster categorizations

High-availability (HA) clusters

High-availability clusters (also known as failover clusters) are implemented primarily for the purpose of improving the availability of services which the cluster provides. They operate by having redundant nodes, which are then used to provide service when system components fail. The most common size for an HA cluster is two nodes, which is the minimum requirement to provide redundancy. HA cluster implementations attempt to manage the redundancy inherent in a cluster to eliminate single points of failure. There are many commercial implementations of High-Availability clusters for many operating systems. The Linux-HA project is one commonly used free software HA package for the Linux OSs. High-availability clusters (also known as HA Clusters) are computer clusters that are implemented primarily for the purpose of improving the availability of services which the cluster provides. ... Network node (NN): A grouping of one or more network elements (at one or more sites) which provides network related functions, and is administered as a single entity. ... The Linux-HA (High-Availability Linux) project provides a high-availability (clustering) solution for Linux,FreeBSD,Solaris which promotes reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS). ... Clockwise from top: The logo of the GNU Project (the GNU head), the Linux kernel mascot Tux the Penguin, and the FreeBSD daemon Free software is a term coined by Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation[1] to refer to software that can be used, studied, and modified without... Linux (IPA pronunciation: ) is a Unix-like computer operating system. ...

Load-balancing clusters

Load-balancing clusters operate by having all workload come through one or more load-balancing front ends, which then distribute it to a collection of back end servers. Although they are primarily implemented for improved performance, they commonly include high-availability features as well. Such a cluster of computers is sometimes referred to as a server farm. There are many commercial load balancers available including Platform LSF HPC, Sun Grid Engine, Moab Cluster Suite and Maui Cluster Scheduler. The Linux Virtual Server project provides one commonly used free software package for the Linux OS. In computer networking, load balancing is a technique (usually performed by load balancers) to spread work between many computers, processes, hard disks or other resources in order to get optimal resource utilization and decrease computing time. ... A typical server farm. ... Load Sharing Facility (or simply LSF) is a commercial computer software job scheduler sold by Platform Computing. ... Sun Grid Engine (SGE), earlier known as CODINE (COmputing in DIstributed Networked Environments) or GRD (Global Resource Director) is an open source batch-queuing system, supported by Sun Microsystems. ... Moab Cluster Suiteâ„¢ is a professional cluster workload management solution based on the open source [Maui Cluster Scheduler]. It integrates the scheduling, managing, monitoring and reporting of cluster workloads. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup, suggested by its AFD discussion. ... Linux Virtual Server (LVS) is an advanced load balancing solution for Linux systems. ...

High-performance computing (HPC) clusters

High-performance computing (HPC) clusters are implemented primarily to provide increased performance by splitting a computational task across many different nodes in the cluster, and are most commonly used in scientific computing. Such clusters commonly run custom programs which have been designed to exploit the parallelism available on HPC clusters. HPCs are optimized for workloads which require jobs or processes happening on the separate cluster computer nodes to communicate actively during the computation. These include computations where intermediate results from one node's calculations will affect future calculations on other nodes. It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Supercomputing. ... Network node (NN): A grouping of one or more network elements (at one or more sites) which provides network related functions, and is administered as a single entity. ...

One of the most popular HPC implementations is a cluster with nodes running Linux as the OS and free software to implement the parallelism. This configuration is often referred to as a Beowulf cluster. Linux (IPA pronunciation: ) is a Unix-like computer operating system. ... It has been suggested that Maintenance OS be merged into this article or section. ... The Borg, a 52-node Beowulf cluster used by the McGill University pulsar group to search for pulsations from binary pulsars. ...

Microsoft offers Windows Compute Cluster Server as a high-performance computing platform to compete with Linux.^[2] Microsoft Corporation, (NASDAQ: MSFT, HKSE: 4338) is a multinational computer technology corporation with global annual revenue of US$44. ... Microsoft Cluster Server (MSCS) is software designed to allow servers to work together as one machine, to provide failover and increased availability of applications, or parallel calculating power in case of high-performance computing (HPC) clusters (as in supercomputing). ... Linux (IPA pronunciation: ) is a Unix-like computer operating system. ...

Many software programs running on High-performance computing (HPC) clusters use libraries such as MPI which are specially designed for writing scientific applications for HPC computers. It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Supercomputing. ... The Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a computer communications protocol. ...

Grid computing

Main article: Grid computing

Grid computing or grid clusters are a technology closely related to cluster computing. The key differences (by definitions which distinguish the two at all) between grids and traditional clusters are that grids connect collections of computers which do not fully trust each other, or which are geographically dispersed. Grids are thus more like a computing utility than like a single computer. In addition, grids typically support more heterogeneous collections than are commonly supported in clusters. Grid computing is a phrase in distributed computing which can have several meanings: A local computer cluster which is like a grid because it is composed of multiple nodes. ... Grid computing is a phrase in distributed computing which can have several meanings: A local computer cluster which is like a grid because it is composed of multiple nodes. ...

Grid computing is optimized for workloads which consist of many independent jobs or packets of work, which do not have to share data between the jobs during the computation process. Grids serve to manage the allocation of jobs to computers which will perform the work independently of the rest of the grid cluster. Resources such as storage may be shared by all the nodes, but intermediate results of one job do not affect other jobs in progress on other nodes of the grid.

An example of a very large cluster is the Folding@home project. It is analyzing data that is used by researchers to find cures for diseases such as Alzheimer's and cancer. Another large project is the SETI@home project, which may be the largest distributed cluster in existence. It uses approximately three million home computers all over the world to analyze data from the Arecibo Observatory radiotelescope, searching for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. Folding@home (also known as FAH or F@H) is a distributed computing project designed to perform computationally intensive simulations of protein folding and other molecular dynamics simulations. ... SETI@home logo SETI@home (SETI at home) is a distributed computing project using Internet-connected computers, hosted by the Space Sciences Laboratory, at the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States. ... The Arecibo Observatory is located approximately 9 miles south-southwest from Arecibo, Puerto Rico (near the extreme southwestern corner of Arecibo pueblo). ... In contrast to an ordinary telescope, which produces visible light images, a radio telescope sees radio waves emitted by radio sources, typically by means of a large parabolic (dish) antenna, or arrays of them. ...

Implementations

The TOP500 organization's semiannual list of the 500 fastest computers usually includes many clusters. TOP500 is a collaboration between the University of Mannheim, the University of Tennessee, and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. As of November 2006, the top supercomputer is the Department of Energy's IBM BlueGene/L system with performance of 280.6 TFlops. The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful publicly-known computer systems in the world. ... The University of Mannheim is one of the younger German universities. ... The University of Tennessee (UT), sometimes called the University of Tennessee at Knoxville (UT Knoxville or UTK), is the flagship institution of the statewide land-grant University of Tennessee public university system in the American state of Tennessee. ... The Berkeley Lab is perched on a hill overlooking the Berkeley central campus and San Francisco Bay. ... A supercomputer is a computer that led the world (or was close to doing so) in terms of processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation, at the time of its introduction. ... The United States Department of Energy (DOE) is a Cabinet-level department of the United States government responsible for energy policy and nuclear safety. ... IBM redirects here. ... Blue Gene/L Blue Gene is computer architecture project designed to produce several next generation super computers, operating in the PFLOPS range. ... In computing, FLOPS (or flops) is an acronym meaning FLoating point Operations Per Second. ...

Clustering can provide significant performance benefits versus price. The System X supercomputer at Virginia Tech, the 28th most powerful supercomputer on Earth as of June 2006[1], is a 12.25 TFlops computer cluster of 1100 Apple XServe G5 2.3 GHz dual-processor machines (4 GB RAM, 80 GB SATA HD) running Mac OS X and using InfiniBand interconnect. The cluster initially consisted of Power Mac G5s; the rack-mountable XServes are denser than desktop Macs, reducing the aggregate size of the cluster. The total cost of the previous Power Mac system was $5.2 million, a tenth of the cost of slower mainframe computer supercomputers. (The Power Mac G5s were sold off.) System X is a supercomputer assembled by Virginia Tech in the summer of 2003, comprising 1,100 Apple PowerMac G5 computers. ... This article or section should include material from Virginia Bioinformatics Institute. ... Apple Inc. ... A small Xserve cluster with an Xserve RAID. Xserve is the name of Apple Computers Macintosh 1U rackmount line of server computers. ... PowerPC 970FX Processor In computing, the PowerPC 970, PowerPC 970FX, PowerPC 970GX, and PowerPC 970MP, are 64-bit processors in the PowerPC family from IBM. The PowerPC 970 was introduced in 2002. ... A gigabyte (derived from the SI prefix giga-) is a unit of information or computer storage equal to 1000³ bytes or 1024³ bytes (1000³ = one billion). ... Random access memory (usually known by its acronym, RAM) is a type of data storage used in computers. ... First generation (1. ... Typical hard drives of the mid-1990s. ... Mac OS X (official IPA pronunciation: ) is a line of proprietary, graphical operating systems developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. ... InfiniBand is a switched fabric communications link primarily used in high-performance computing. ... Power Mac G5 The Power Mac G5 is Apple Computers name for models of the Power Mac which utilize the PowerPC G5 processor. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ...

The central concept of a Beowulf cluster is the use of commercial off-the-shelf computers to produce a cost-effective alternative to a traditional supercomputer. One project that took this to an extreme was the Stone Soupercomputer. The Borg, a 52-node Beowulf cluster used by the McGill University pulsar group to search for pulsations from binary pulsars. ... Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) is a term for software or hardware products that are ready-made and available for sale to the general public. ... The Stone Soupercomputer was a Beowulf computer cluster built at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 1997. ...

However it is worth noting that FLOPs (floating point operations per second), aren't always the best metric for supercomputer speed. Clusters can have very high FLOPs, but they cannot access all data the cluster as a whole has at once. Therefore clusters are excellent for parallel computation, but much poorer than traditional supercomputers at non-parallel computation.

JavaSpaces is a specification from Sun Microsystems that enables clustering computers via a distributed shared memory. JavaSpaces is a service specification. ... Sun Microsystems, Inc. ...

History

The history of cluster computing is best captured by a footnote in Greg Pfister's In Search of Clusters: "Virtually every press release from DEC mentioning clusters says 'DEC, who invented clusters...'. IBM did not invent them either. Customers invented clusters, as soon as they could not fit all their work on one computer, or needed a backup. The date of the first is unknown, but it would be surprising if it was not in the 1960s, or even late 1950s."

The formal engineering basis of cluster computing as a means of doing parallel work of any sort was arguably invented by Gene Amdahl of IBM, who in 1967 published what has come to be regarded as the seminal paper on parallel processing: Amdahl's Law. Amdahl's Law describes mathematically the speedup one can expect from parallelizing any given otherwise serially performed task on a parallel architecture. This article defined the engineering basis for both multiprocessor computing and cluster computing, where the primary differentiator is whether or not the interprocessor communications are supported "inside" the computer (on for example a customized internal communications bus or network) or "outside" the computer on a commodity network. IBM redirects here. ... The speedup of a program using multiple processors in parallel computing is limited by the sequential fraction of the program. ...

Consequently the history of early computer clusters is more or less directly tied into the history of early networks, as one of the primary motivation for the development of a network was to link computing resources, creating a de facto computer cluster. Packet switching networks were conceptually invented by the RAND corporation in 1962. Using the concept of a packet switched network, the ARPANET project succeeded in creating in 1969 what was arguably the world's first commodity-network based computer cluster by linking four different computer centers (each of which was something of a "cluster" in its own right, but probably not a commodity cluster). The ARPANET project grew into the Internet -- which can be thought of as "the mother of all computer clusters" (as the union of nearly all of the compute resources, including clusters, that happen to be connected). It also established the paradigm in use by all computer clusters in the world today -- the use of packet-switched networks to perform interprocessor communications between processor (sets) located in otherwise disconnected frames. In computer networking and telecommunications, packet switching is a communications paradigm in which packets (messages or fragments of messages) are individually routed between nodes, with no previously established communication path. ... The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit global policy think tank first formed to offer research and analysis to the United States armed forces. ... Year 1962 (MCMLXII) was a common year starting on Monday (the link is to a full 1962 calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... ARPANET logical map, March 1977. ... Also: 1969 (Stargate SG-1) episode. ...

The development of customer-built and research clusters proceeded hand in hand with that of both networks and the Unix operating system from the early 1970s, as both TCP/IP and the Xerox PARC project created and formalized protocols for network-based communications. The Hydra operating system was built for a cluster of DEC PDP-11 minicomputers called C.mmp at C-MU in 1971. However, it was not until circa 1983 that the protocols and tools for easily doing remote job distribution and file sharing were defined (largely within the context of BSD Unix, as implemented by Sun Microsystems) and hence became generally available commercially, along with a shared filesystem. Filiation of Unix and Unix-like systems Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX®) is a computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Douglas McIlroy. ... The Internet protocol suite is the set of communications protocols that implement the protocol stack on which the Internet runs. ... Bold text // Headline text Link title This article is about the computer research center. ... HYDRA was an early capability-based, object oriented operating system created as part of the C.mmp project at Carnegie-Mellon University in 1971 [1]. HYDRA was designed to be modular and secure, and intended to be flexible enough for easy experimentation [2]. ^ ^ HYDRA: The Kernel of a Multiprocessor Operating... The PDP-11 was a 16-bit minicomputer sold by Digital Equipment Corp. ... The C.mmp was an early multiprocessor system developed at Carnegie_Mellon_University by W.A.Wulf (1971). ... Year 1983 (MCMLXXXIII) was a common year starting on Saturday (link displays the 1983 Gregorian calendar). ... Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD, sometimes called Berkeley Unix) is the Unix derivative distributed by the University of California, Berkeley, starting in the 1970s. ... Sun Microsystems, Inc. ...

The first commercial clustering product was ARCnet, developed by Datapoint in 1977. ARCnet was not a commercial success and clustering per se did not really take off until DEC released their VAXcluster product in the 1984 for the VAX/VMS operating system. The ARCnet and VAXcluster products not only supported parallel computing, but also shared file systems and peripheral devices. They were supposed to give you the advantage of parallel processing, while maintaining data reliability and uniqueness. VAXcluster, now VMScluster, is still available on OpenVMS systems from HP running on Alpha and Itanium systems. ARCNET (also CamelCased as ARCnet, an acronym from Attached Resource Computer NETwork) is a local area network (LAN) protocol, similar in purpose to Ethernet or Token Ring. ... Datapoint Corporation, originally known as Computer Terminal Corporation (CTC), was a computer company based in San Antonio, Texas. ... The DEC logo Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering American company in the computer industry. ... A VMScluster is a computer cluster involving a group of computers running the OpenVMS operating system. ... Year 1984 (MCMLXXXIV) was a leap year starting on Sunday (link displays the 1984 Gregorian calendar). ... OpenVMS[1] (Open Virtual Memory System or just VMS) is the name of a high-end computer server operating system that runs on the VAX[2] and Alpha[3] family of computers developed by Digital Equipment Corporation of Maynard, Massachusetts (DIGITAL was then purchased by Compaq, and is now owned... It has been suggested that Crash counting be merged into this article or section. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Computer hardware. ... OpenVMS[1] (Open Virtual Memory System or just VMS) is the name of a high-end computer server operating system that runs on the VAX[2] and Alpha[3] family of computers developed by Digital Equipment Corporation of Maynard, Massachusetts (DIGITAL was then purchased by Compaq, and is now owned... HP may refer to: Handley Page Aircraft Company Harry Potter, a series of fantasy novels by British writer J. K. Rowling Hello! Project (H!P), a Japanese pop recording project Hewlett-Packard, a computer and computer peripheral company High Point, North Carolina High potency, a term used in biology, pharmacology...

Two other noteworthy early commercial clusters were the Tandem Himalaya (a circa 1994 high-availability product) and the IBM S/390 Parallel Sysplex (also circa 1994, primarily for business use). Tandem Computers was an early manufacturer of fault tolerant computer systems, marketed to the growing number of transaction processing customers who used them for ATMs, banks, stock exchanges and other similar needs. ... Year 1994 (MCMXCIV) was a common year starting on Saturday (link will display full 1994 Gregorian calendar). ... Year 1994 (MCMXCIV) was a common year starting on Saturday (link will display full 1994 Gregorian calendar). ...

No history of commodity computer clusters would be complete without noting the pivotal role played by the development of Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) software in 1989. This open source software based on TCP/IP communications enabled the instant creation of a virtual supercomputer -- a high performance compute cluster -- made out of any TCP/IP connected systems. Free form heterogeneous clusters built on top of this model rapidly achieved total throughput in FLOPS that greatly exceeded that available even with the most expensive "big iron" supercomputers. PVM and the advent of inexpensive networked PCs led, in 1993, to a NASA project to build supercomputers out of commodity clusters. In 1995 the invention of the "beowulf"-style cluster -- a compute cluster built on top of a commodity network for the specific purpose of "being a supercomputer" capable of performing tightly coupled parallel HPC computations. This in turn spurred the independent development of Grid computing as a named entity, although Grid-style clustering had been around at least as long as the Unix operating system and the Arpanet, whether or not it, or the clusters that used it, were named. The Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) is a software tool for parallel networking of computers. ... Year 1989 (MCMLXXXIX) was a common year starting on Sunday (link displays 1989 Gregorian calendar). ... ... The Internet protocol suite is the set of communications protocols that implement the protocol stack on which the Internet runs. ... In computing, FLOPS (or flops) is an acronym meaning FLoating point Operations Per Second. ... Big Iron is a country music ballad by Marty Robbins, originally released as an album track on Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs in September 1959, then as a single in February 1960. ... Year 1993 (MCMXCIII) was a common year starting on Friday (link will display full 1993 Gregorian calendar). ... The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is an agency of the United States government, responsible for the nations public space program. ... Year 1995 (MCMXCV) was a common year starting on Sunday (link will display full 1995 Gregorian calendar). ... The Borg, a 52-node Beowulf cluster used by the McGill University pulsar group to search for pulsations from binary pulsars. ... Grid computing is a phrase in distributed computing which can have several meanings: A local computer cluster which is like a grid because it is composed of multiple nodes. ... Filiation of Unix and Unix-like systems Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX®) is a computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Douglas McIlroy. ...

Technologies

MPI is a widely-available communications library that enables parallel programs to be written in C, Fortran, Python, OCaml, and many other programming languages. The Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a computer communications protocol. ... C is a general-purpose, block structured, procedural, imperative computer programming language developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system. ... Fortran (previously FORTRAN[1]) is a general-purpose[2], procedural,[3] imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. ... Python is a high-level programming language first released by Guido van Rossum in 1991. ... Objective Caml (OCaml) is a general-purpose programming language descended from the ML family, created by Xavier Leroy, Jérôme Vouillon, Damien Doligez, Didier Rémy and others in 1996. ...

The GNU/Linux world sports various cluster software; for application clustering, there is Beowulf, distcc, and MPICH. Linux Virtual Server, Linux-HA - director-based clusters that allow incoming requests for services to be distributed across multiple cluster nodes. MOSIX, openMosix, Kerrighed, OpenSSI are full-blown clusters integrated into the kernel that provide for automatic process migration among homogeneous nodes. OpenSSI, openMosix and Kerrighed are single-system image implementations. The Borg, a 52-node Beowulf cluster used by the McGill University pulsar group to search for pulsations from binary pulsars. ... distcc is a computer program that distributes processes of compiling C and its derivatives like C++ and Objective C source code over a computer network. ... MPICH is a freely available, portable implementation of MPI, a standard for message-passing for distributed-memory applications used in Parallel computing. ... Linux Virtual Server (LVS) is an advanced load balancing solution for Linux systems. ... The Linux-HA (High-Availability Linux) project provides a high-availability (clustering) solution for Linux,FreeBSD,Solaris which promotes reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS). ... Mosix Cluster MOSIX is a cluster management system that provides single-system image (SSI) capabilities, e. ... Transfers in an openMosix cluster. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... OpenSSI is a single-system image clustering solution for Linux. ... A kernel connects the application software to the hardware of a computer. ... Single-system image or SSI is when the Operating System maintains its state as a single copy of data in memory. ...

Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 based on the Windows Server platform provides pieces for High Performance Computing like the Job Scheduler, MSMPI library and management tools. NCSA's recently installed Lincoln is a cluster of 450 Dell PowerEdge™ 1855 blade servers running Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003. This cluster debuted at #130 on the Top500 list in June 2006. Windows redirects here. ... Windows Server may refer to: Windows 2000 Server, the release based on Windows 2000 Windows Server 2003, the current release of Windows Server Windows Server Longhorn, the upcoming release of Windows Server Windows Home Server, an upcoming server operating system intended for home use Microsoft Servers, a family of servers... NCSA may refer to: the National Center for Supercomputing Applications the North Carolina School of the Arts This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ... The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful publicly-known computer systems in the world. ...

DragonFly BSD, a recent fork of FreeBSD 4.8 is being redesigned at its core to enable native clustering capabilities. It also aims to achieve single-system image capabilities. DragonFly BSD is a free Unix-like operating system created as a fork of FreeBSD 4. ... In software, a project fork or branch happens when a developer (or a group of them) takes code from a project and starts to develop independently of the rest. ... FreeBSD is a Unix-like free operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) branch through the 386BSD and 4. ... Single-system image or SSI is when the Operating System maintains its state as a single copy of data in memory. ...

See also

• Distributed data store
• Flash mob computing
• Peer-to-peer
• Symmetric multiprocessing
• Two-node cluster
• Computer cluster in virtual machines

A distributed data store is a network in which a user stores his or her information on a number of peer network nodes. ... A flash mob computing (also flash mob computer) is a temporary ad-hoc computer cluster running specific software to coordinate the individual computers into one single supercomputer. ... A peer-to-peer (or P2P) computer network is a network that relies on the computing power and bandwidth of the participants in the network rather than concentrating it in a relatively few servers. ... Symmetric Multiprocessing, or SMP, is a multiprocessor computer architecture where two or more identical processors are connected to a single shared main memory. ... A two-node cluster is the minimal Computer cluster that can be built. ... Computer Clusters run usually on physical computers. ...

References

David A. Bader is an Associate Professor in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. ... The College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology is the oldest computing program in the world,[1] with their roots stretching back to an Information Science degree established in 1964. ... Year 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era. ... is the 194th day of the year (195th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era. ... is the 194th day of the year (195th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ...

Further reading

• Karl Kopper: The Linux Enterprise Cluster: Build a Highly Available Cluster with Commodity Hardware and Free Software, No Starch Press, ISBN 1-59327-036-4
• Evan Marcus, Hal Stern: Blueprints for High Availability: Designing Resilient Distributed Systems, John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 0-471-35601-8
• Greg Pfister: In Search of Clusters, Prentice Hall, ISBN 0-13-899709-8
• Rajkumar Buyya (editor): High Performance Cluster Computing: Architectures and Systems, Volume 1, ISBN 0-13-013784-7, Prentice Hall, NJ, USA, 1999.
• Rajkumar Buyya (editor): High Performance Cluster Computing: Programming and Applications, Volume 2, ISBN 0-13-013785-5, Prentice Hall, NJ, USA, 1999.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Computer cluster

• IEEE task force on cluster computing

	Topics in Parallel Computing	v • d • e
General High-performance computing Parallelism Data parallelism • Task parallelism Theory Speedup • Amdahl's law • Flynn's Taxonomy (SISD, SIMD, MISD, MIMD) • Cost efficiency • Gustafson's Law • Karp-Flatt metric Elements Process • Thread • Fiber • Parallel Random Access Machine Coordination Multiprocessing • Multithreading •Multitasking • Memory coherency • Cache coherency • Barrier • Synchronization • Distributed computing • Grid computing Programming Programming model • Implicit parallelism • Explicit parallelism Hardware Computer cluster • Beowulf • Symmetric multiprocessing • Non-Uniform Memory Access • Cache only memory architecture • Asymmetric multiprocessing • Simultaneous multithreading • Shared memory • Distributed memory • Massively parallel processing • Superscalar processing • Vector processing • Supercomputer • Stream processing Software Distributed shared memory • Application checkpointing • WareWulf APIs Pthreads • OpenMP • Message Passing Interface (MPI) Problems Embarrassingly parallel • Grand Challenge • Software lockout