Cluster Computing

See Cluster Computing for a definition Engineering a Beowulf-style Compute Cluster

What is a Cluster

A cluster is a setup of two or more computers - called nodes - that work together to perform a task.

Types Of Clusters

Basically there are four type of clusters:

• Storage Clusters (Shared filesystem among nodes)
• High Availability Clusters (Failover, redundancy)
• Load Balancing Clusters (Distribute Load between two or more nodes)
• High Performance Clusters (Parallel computing, more nodes solving the same problem)

Often you would need a combination of these Clusters in a installation.

Linux Clustering at Mercantec

Project: Mercantec Beowulf

The goal of the Mercantec Beowulf are to build a scalable cluster for cracking MD5 hashes or some other similar task which are easily distributed among nodes.
The individual nodes should boot from PXE on the network and automatically enter the cluster.