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1.3) Computer Cluster Architecture


In recent years, HPC hardware has been dominated by “computer clusters”. These are typically built from commodity off the shelf servers connected via high speed interconnects. Cluster sizes range from a few servers to hundreds and even thousands of servers. In effect, this aggregates the computing power of these servers in such a way to deliver much higher performance than would be available on a desktop machine or workstation.

This collection of interconnected stand-alone servers are configured to work together as a single computing resource. The predominant operating systems (OS) in HPC and computer clusters are Linux and Unix based systems.