Re: What is a Cluster?

[Fabio Olive Leite <olive@conectiva.com.br>]

Hi there,

Ultimately, and down to the bones, the definition of Cluster is: a group of
interconnected machines that can communicate, and thus coordinate the
execution of whatever task it is supposed to do, be it serve some network
service, compute fast, serve the queues of a batch job system, whatever.

The stress is on "communicate and thus coordinate". If the machines are
somehow aware of the connection between them, they can use this fact to
manage their actions and achieve something better than their normal
capabilities.

Hope this helps!

Fábio
-- 
( Fábio Olivé Leite -*- http://www.conectiva.com.br/~olive )

Linux-cluster: generic cluster infrastructure for Linux
Archive:       http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-cluster/