An interesting situation has developed in the modern information technology market . Powerful servers, which cost several tens of times more than conventional personal computers, surpass them in power by only two to three times maximum. The question is, why pay more if you can use excellent technology and combine several disparate personal computers in a cluster. This will help you save money and not lose in the power that is needed for certain purposes. In addition, in the bonus you get a duplicated system. Failover cluster allows you to build a highly reliable system.
Cluster technology is widely used in various fields of activity where the use of powerful computers is only necessary. A cluster is a certain group (tens, hundreds, thousands) of disparate computers, combined in such a way that it represents a whole resource for carrying out calculations. At the same time, despite the large number of components, it is visible as a whole.
One of the main reasons for the emergence of technology for combining computers into a cluster is the wide popularity of the Internet and its frantic growth rate. The increase in the amount of information transmitted necessitated powerful processing systems. But the hardware, with all its technological development, can not always cope with the tasks assigned to it.
Therefore, it became necessary to combine this hardware to perform global tasks. In addition, the high reliability that a server cluster could provide was necessary for large corporations that store vast amounts of information.
According to their territorial distribution, clusters are divided into centralized and decentralized. The first, as a rule, are located within the same room, the second, on the contrary, can be scattered at considerable distances from each other. Increasingly, this technology is used in the field of computing, which requires high hardware performance.
The high quality of the connecting components, the high power of individual stations at huge processing speeds of information flows - everything combined in a cluster is a huge device that allows you to perform tasks of absolutely any complexity: from disaster modeling to controlling atomic collisions at light speeds.
The next stage in the development of network technologies could well be a matrix computing system. Its essence lies in the fact that free from work resources of all computers and devices included in the network are used to solve global problems. This is achieved by parallel processing of information.
Cluster systems have a number of advantages over conventional single-block structures. They are much more productive, more powerful and more reliable. Using cluster technology, it is possible to achieve solutions to almost any tasks, regardless of the level of complexity.