CLUSTERING Categories of Clusters A computer cluster is a group of linked computers, working together closely so t hat in many respects they

form a single computer. The components of a cluster ar e commonly, but not always, connected to each other through fast local area netw orks. Clusters are usually deployed to improve performance and/or availability o ver that provided by a single computer, while typically being much more cost-eff ective than single computers of comparable speed or availability. High-availability (HA) clusters Load-balancing clusters Compute clusters Grid computing High-availability clusters (also known as Failover Clusters) are implemented pri marily for the purpose of improving the availability of services which the clust er provides. They operate by having redundant nodes, which are then used to prov ide 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 use redundancy of cluster components to eliminate si ngle points of failure. Introduction Types of Clusters High-availability (HA) clusters There are many commercial implementations of High- Availability clusters for man y operating systems. The Linux-HA project is one commonly used free software HA package for the Linux operating systems. Loadc balancing clusters Load-balancing when multiple computers are linked together to share computationa l workload or function as a single virtual computer. Logically, from the user si de, they are multiple machines, but function as a single virtual machine. Reques ts initiated from the user are managed by, and distributed among, all the standa lone computers to form a cluster. This results in balanced computational work am ong different machines, improving the performance of the cluster system. Compute clusters Often clusters are used for primarily computational purposes, rather than handli ng IO-oriented operations such as web service or databases. For instance, a clus ter might support computational simulations of weather or vehicle crashes. The p rimary distinction within compute clusters is how tightly- coupled the individua l nodes are. For instance, a single compute job may require frequent communicati on among nodes c this implies that the cluster shares a dedicated network, is de nsely located, and probably has homogenous nodes. This cluster design is usually referred to as Beowulf Cluster. The other extreme is where a compute job uses o ne or few nodes, and needs little or no inter-node communication. This latter ca tegory is sometimes called "Grid" computing. Tightly- p w coupled compute cluste rs are designed for work that might traditionally have been called "supercomputi ng". Middleware such as MPI (Message Passing Interface) or PVM (Parallel Virtual Mach ine) permits compute clustering programs to be portable to a wide variety of clu sters.

Grid computing Grids are usually computer clusters, but more focused on throughput like a compu ting utility rather than running fewer, tightly-coupled jobs. Often, grids will incorporate heterogeneous collections of computers, possibly distributed geograp hically, sometimes administered by unrelated organizations. 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. Resou rces 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 grid is the Folding@home project. It is analyzing dat a 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 larges t distributed grid in existence. It uses approximately three million home comput ers all over the world to analyze data from the Arecibo Observatory radiotelesco pe, searching for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. Grid computing contd.. In both of these cases, there is no intere node communication or shared storage. Individual nodes connect to a main, cent ral location to retrieve a small processing job. They then perform the computati on and return the result to the central server. In the case of the @home project s, the software is generally run when the computer is otherwise idle. The grid s etup means that the nodes can take however many jobs they are able in one sessio n. THANK YOU