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.