Clusters, Grids, MPPs, MPI, OpenMP, HA, LB, GPGPU, FPGA, SMP, NUMA,
SSE etc..
These abbreviations and terms almost cram my head, so I have to
redvelop and re-index them in my memory(brain).
think of what the acronym is abbreviating, and the logic of that name.
As a newbie, when I read the articles in wikipekia, I got confused.
In the segment Cluster categorizations
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_cluster#Cluster_categorizations>
that's horrible and incomplete.
IMO, HA and load-balancing are not really distinctly different, since
LB is really just active-active HA. (or HA is active-passive LB).
other than HA/LB, clusters are computational. within compute clusters,
the main distinction is how tightly coupled they (or the programs they run)
are. grids are the extreme loose end: basically no inter-node communication,
often geographically distributed, often ad-hoc collections of different kinds
of machines run by different organizations. the opposite is a homogenous,
tightly-coupled cluster with a dedicated local network optimized for
inter-node communication and running few multi-node jobs.
, both "Cluster computing" and "Grid computing" are the subclasses of
"cluster computing" is descriptive: the entity is a set of nodes somehow
combined, usually by a local communication fabric. by definition, the nodes
are separate, so distributed. (the 'distributed' here means that
communication is by explicit message passing; the opposite is shared-memory,
where communication is implicit and done by read/write operations to memory.)
"grid" is a marketing term for "loosely coupled distributed clustering";
it was a trendy word 10 years ago, but has fallen into disuse because it's
so generic (and not all that widely applicable).
"Distribute computing" ,and the third one is "Massive parallel
processing ". IMHO, the latter category is more reasonable(right or not?) .
MPP doesn't mean much; its best to avoid the term and stick to more
specific ones.
However, since there are too many cluster software products, how
can I categorize Beowulf like clusters( loosely coupled, use MPI)? or
beowulf certainly does not imply loose coupling (or rule out PVM.)
what's the category of Beowulf like clusters?
beowulf is compute clustering using mostly commodity hardware and mostly
open-source software.
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