The desire to get more computing power and better reliability by orchestrating a number of low-cost
The … See more

Greg Pfister has stated that clusters were not invented by any specific vendor but by customers who could not fit all their work on one computer, or needed a backup. Pfister estimates the date as some time in the 1960s. The … See more

Computer clusters may be configured for different purposes ranging from general purpose business needs such as web-service support, to computation-intensive scientific calculations. In either case, the cluster ma… See more

Clusters are primarily designed with performance in mind, but installations are based on many other factors. Fault tolerance (the ability for a system to continue working with a malfunctioning node) allow… See more

One of the issues in designing a cluster is how tightly coupled the individual nodes may be. For instance, a single computer job may require frequent communication among nodes: this implies that the cluster shares a d… See more

As the computer clusters were appearing during the 1980s, so were supercomputers. One of the elements that distinguished the three classes at that time was that the early supercomputers relied on shared memory. To date, cl… See more

One of the challenges in the use of a computer cluster is the cost of administrating it which can at times be as high as the cost of administrating N independent machines, if the cluster has N nodes. In s… See more