Computer Clusters essays

Computer Clusters essays Computer clustering involves the use of multiple hardware, typically personal computers (PCs) or UNIX workstations, storage devices, and redundant interconnections, to form what appears to users as a single integrated system (Cluster computing). Clustering has been available since the 1980s when it was used in Digital Equipment Corp.'s VMS system. Today, most leading hardware and software companies support clustering because of its demand for parallel processing, batch processing, load balancing and Parallel processing is the processing of program instructions by dividing them among multiple processors with the objective of running a program in less time. Parallel processing is normally applied for rendering and high computational based applications. Rather than using expensive specialized supercomputers for parallel processing, implementers have begun using a large cluster of small commodity servers. Each server runs its own operating system, to take a number of jobs, process them, and send the output to the primary system (Grama, 2003). Clusters provide the ability to handle a large task in small bits, or lots and lots of small tasks across an entire cluster, making an entire system more affordable and The first PC cluster to be described in scientific literature was named Beowulf and was developed in 1994 at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (Beowulf clusters compared to Base One's batch job servers). Beowulf initially consisted of sixteen PCs, standard Ethernet, and Linux with modifications and achieved seventy million floating point operations per second. For only $40,000 in hardware, Beowulf produced the processing power of a small supercomputer costing about $400,000 at that time. By 1996, researchers had achieved one billion floating point operations per second at a cost of less than $50,000. Later, in 1999, the University of ...