ABSTRACT
Clusters with commodity processors and commodity interconnects are gaining momentum to provide cost-effective processing power for a range of applications in multiple disciplines. Examples of such applications include: high-end computing, parallel file systems, multi-tier web datacenters, web servers, visualization servers, multimedia servers, database and data-mining systems, etc. As the performance and features of commodity processors and commodity networking continue to grow, clusters are becoming popular to design systems with scalability, modularity and upgradability. According to the TOP500 list [434], clusters entered the high-end computing market in a very small manner (only 6%) in 2001. However, as of November 2008, 82% of TOP500 systems are clusters.
