Computer cluster: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 19:29, 20 July 2024

Revision as of 19:30, 20 July 2024

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==Design and configuration==

[[File:beowulf.png|thumb|240px|left|A typical Beowulf configuration]]

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 dedicated network, is densely located, and probably has homogeneous nodes. The other extreme is where a computer job uses one or few nodes, and needs little or no inter-node communication, approaching [[grid computing]].

In a [[Beowulf cluster]], the application programs never see the computational nodes (also called slave computers) but only interact with the "Master" which is a specific computer handling the scheduling and management of the slaves.<ref name=VECPAR /> In a typical implementation the Master has two network interfaces, one that communicates with the private Beowulf network for the slaves, the other for the general purpose network of the organization.<ref name=VECPAR /> The slave computers typically have their own version of the same operating system, and local memory and disk space. However, the private slave network may also have a large and shared file server that stores global persistent data, accessed by the slaves as needed.<ref name=VECPAR />

Due to the increasing computing power of each generation of [[game console]]s, a novel use has emerged where they are repurposed into [[High-performance computing]] (HPC) clusters. Some examples of game console clusters are [[PlayStation 3 cluster|Sony PlayStation clusters]] and [[Microsoft]] [[Xbox (console)|Xbox]] clusters. Another example of consumer game product is the [[Nvidia Tesla Personal Supercomputer]] workstation, which uses multiple graphics accelerator processor chips. Besides game consoles, high-end graphics cards too can be used instead. The use of graphics cards (or rather their GPU's) to do calculations for grid computing is vastly more economical than using CPU's, despite being less precise. However, when using double-precision values, they become as precise to work with as CPU's and are still much less costly (purchase cost).<ref name="pcauthority" />

A special purpose 144-node [[DEGIMA (computer cluster)|DEGIMA cluster]] is tuned to running astrophysical N-body simulations using the Multiple-Walk parallel tree code, rather than general purpose scientific computations.<ref name=Hamada>{{cite journal|first=Tsuyoshi|last=Hamada |display-authors=etal |year=2009|title=A novel multiple-walk parallel algorithm for the Barnes–Hut treecode on GPUs – towards cost effective, high performance N-body simulation|journal=Computer Science – Research and Development|volume=24|issue=1–2 |pages=21–31 |doi=10.1007/s00450-009-0089-1|s2cid=31071570 }}</ref>

Computer clusters haWith the advent of [[virtualization]], the cluster nodes may run on separate physical computers with different operating systems which are painted above with a virtual layer to look similar.{{citation needed|date=November 2013}}{{clarify|date=November 2013}}

Due to the increasing computing power of each generation of [[game console]]s, a novel use has emerged where they are repurposed into [[High-performance computing]] (HPC) clusters. Some examples of game console clusters are [[PlayStation 3 cluster|Sony PlayStation clusters]] and [[Microsoft]] [[Xbox (console)|Xbox]] clusters. Another example of consumer game product is the [[Nvidia Tesla Personal Supercomputer]] workstation, which uses multiple graphics accelerator processor chips. Besides game consoles, high-end graphics cards too can be used instead. The use of graphics cards (or rather their GPU's) to do calculations for grid computing is vastly more economical than using CPU's, despite being less precise. However, when using double-precision values, they become as precise to work with as CPU's and are still much less costly (purchase cost).<ref name=pcauthority />

Computer clusters have historically run on separate physical [[computer]]s with the same [[operating system]]. With the advent of [[virtualization]], the cluster nodes may run on separate physical computers with different operating systems which are painted above with a virtual layer to look similar.<ref name=linuxjournal>{{cite web|url=http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8812|title=Xen Virtualization and Linux Clustering, Part 1|date=12 Jan 2006|website=Linux Journal|first=Ryan|last=Mauer|access-date=2 Jun 2017}}</ref>{{citation needed|date=November 2013}}{{clarify|date=November 2013}} The cluster may also be virtualized on various configurations as maintenance takes place; an example implementation is [[Xen]] as the virtualization manager with [[Linux-HA]].<ref name="linuxjournal" />

==Data sharing and communication==