> A friend of mine working for Microsoft is asking me (and I quote):
>
> || BTW: does Linux know about clusters? As far as I know, no.
> || NT5 knows already and this makes it less prone to attacks..
>
> Which proves that indeed what they understand by "clustering". But what
> really is clustering, and does linux support it?
There is a few things that can be called "clusters". What *I* call a
cluster is a thing like Beowulf systems
(http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/beowulf/). Those things pool
computing power to complete large and complex calculations. Beowulf is
the name of a system based on Linux. One of the newest large Beowulf
cluster around, Avalon (http://cnls.lanl.gov/avalon/), made with 68 DEC
Alpha's, capable of 19.3 GigaFLOPS!
Another form of clustering is one of redundancy. You have for example 10
web servers serving the same URLs with load-balancing between them, for
additional client capacity and better reliability (as a few defective
nodes will only lessen performance).
Microsoft has something called Wolfpack, that I don't even know what it
does exactly.
-- Pierre Phaneuf Web: http://newsfeed.sx.nec.com/~ynecpip/ finger: ynecpip@newsfeed.sx.nec.com- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu