What is a cluster? Cluster can be defined as a group of computers running as one computer. There ...
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What is a cluster? Cluster can be defined as a group of computers running as one computer. There are several types of clusters. However, in this tutorial we will be talking about High Performance Computing (HPC) Cluster. Cluster is a replacement of supercomputers which have very high computing performance as well as very high cost. To make a cluster you need normal Personal Computers (PCs) and network cards on the machines and switch to connect the machines. Definitely, this reduces the cost of having high performance supercomputer. The notion of a cluster is having more that two machines connected together by the network. A master machine or front-end machine is basically like the God of the cluster. The master node is controlling everything in the cluster. It has at least two network cards one of them is connected to the outside world and the other is connected to the network of the cluster. The other nodes which are called compute nodes are connected to the network as well. Compute nodes receive commands to be executed from the master node. After the nodes finish executing the tasks they return the output to the master node. The master node is responsible of distributing the tasks to the nodes evenly. The interesting point in running a cluster is that the cluster runs best under Linux Operating System and Linux tools. So it is free. How to build a cluster? In this section, we will build a cluster from scratch. So, before we build it we need to know our architecture of the cluster. We will build the structure using 3 computers 64-bit.
And we need a switch and network cables. What else? Of course we need operating system to run the cluster i.e. based Linux. The following figure depicts the architecture of our cluster.................. .
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