i meant the more like Beowulf Cluster? On Sun, 3 Feb 2002 14:56:08 +0100 Cees van de Griend <cees-list@griend.xs4all.nl> wrote:
On Sun, Feb 03, 2002 at 08:24:20AM -0500, Landy Roman wrote:
what is a cluster? :-)
According to my dictionary: a number of things gathered close together in a small group, especially around a central point.
Maybe not very helpfull...
Are you asking about a so called Beowulf Cluster?
It's a master which acts as a front to a lot of computers connected to it (slaves). This master can distribute the workload over the other computers. Normally special programs are written where each part of that program, i.e. a calculation, can be send to different slave machines. A bit like seti@home does.
The outside world only sees the master.
The so called cluster size, the number of slaves, can vary. IIRC the NASA has a (Linux) Beowulf cluster of more than 1000 PC's.
(You could also have meant a number of other clusters which are PC related, like cluster size of a hard disk.)
Regards, Cees.