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:

Types 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.

Load Balancing Clusters

Load balancing with Cisco IOS NAT

High Performance Clusters

While there are several systems for cluster computing. OSCAR is very popular.

Grid computing

For example seti@home

Examples of cluster solutions

• Redhat cluster computing

Diskless nodes

See Pegasus homepage for ideas to implement a diskless Linux cluster.

Concepts and abbreviations

Fencing

When a node fails in a cluster, the node is fenced, which means it will be rejected from shared resources.

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.