A very, very brief introduction to clustering

Most of the time, your computer is bored. Start a program like xload or top that monitors your system use, and you will probably find that your processor load is not even hitting the 1.0 mark. If you have two or more computers, chances are that at any given time, at least one of them is doing nothing. Unfortunately, when you really do need CPU power - during a C++ compile, or encoding Ogg Vorbis music files - you need a lot of it at once. The idea behind clustering is to spread these loads among all available computers, using the resources that are free on other machines.

The basic unit of a cluster is a single computer, also called a "node". Clusters can grow in size - they "scale" - by adding more machines. A cluster as a whole will be more powerful the faster the individual computers and the faster their connection speeds are. In addition, the operating system of the cluster must make the best use of the available hardware in response to changing conditions. This becomes more of a challenge if the cluster is composed of different hardware types (a "heterogeneous" cluster), if the configuration of the cluster changes unpredictably (machines joining and leaving the cluster), and the loads cannot be predicted ahead of time.

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/openMosix-HOWTO/x135.html

Paham ??? Jadi gini, cluster itu intinya menggabungkan beberapa computer supaya dapat bekerja sama dalam menjalankan proses , sehingga didapatkan performansi yang lebih maksimal... Powerfull ato tidaknya cluster bergantung kecepatan masing2 komputer yang digabungin sama kecepatan koneksi antar komputer cluster.
Pada dasarnya, ada beberapa tipe cluster :
1. Fail-over Clusters --> Terdiri dari gabungan 2 komputer. Jika salah satu komputer mengalami kegagalan, maka proses akan di take over oleh komputer yang satunya lagi...
2. load-balancing clusters --> Prinsip kerjanya, jika ada request untuk menjalankan sebuah proses, maka system akan melihat processor yang mana yang sedang tidak sibuk untuk menangani proses tersebut.
3.HPC( High Performance Computing Cluster) --> Cluster yang dikonfigurasi untuk memberikan performansi yang ekstrim ... Cluster jenis ini sebenarnya menggunakan prinsip load balancing yang telah dikonfigurasi dengan berbagai fitur. Pada cluster jenis ini, proses dijalankan secara paralel, dengan mendistribusikan proses ke seluruh komputer cluster...

Interesting ???
What next ???

OpenMosix is a Linux kernel extension for single-system image clustering which turns a network of ordinary computers into a supercomputer...

Insya Allah in the next notes...