Clustering Technologies

Historically, one of the ways of gathering large numbers of processors together was to use a cluster of machines. An advantage of doing this was that it increased the available disk space, memory, and memory bandwidth as well as the number of CPUs. The capacity of a single multicore processor has increased such that work that previously required a small cluster will now fit onto a single system. It is therefore interesting to consider technologies that might be used in this domain.

MPI

Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a parallelization model that allows a single application to span over multiple nodes. Each node is one or more software threads on a system, so it is quite permissible to host multiple nodes on the same system. Hence, a multicore system can host multiple MPI nodes.