NPAC Technical Report SCCS-748

Cluster Computing Review

Mark Baker

Submitted November 16 1995

Abstract

This review was commissioned by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) New Technology Sub Committee (NTSC) and follows two other reports: a historic review of Cluster Computing produced by the Manchester Computing Centre, and a critical review of Cluster Computing projects funded by the NTSC and produced by the University of Southampton.

This review addresses several issues, and it is hoped that it will provide enough information to:

Indicate the potential benefits and costs associated with Cluster Computing.
Identify the important features of CMS.
Provide an overview of the CMS packages around.
Act as a guide through the maze of CMS packages.
Be used for making decisions.
Provide references, technical details and contact points.

The overall aim is to guide the reader through the mine-field that surrounds distributed and cluster computing software.

The material contained in this report has been put together using information gathered from numerous World Wide Web (WWW) sites, product descriptions supplied by vendors or included in software releases, and from various cluster review documents. Due to the limitations of time, the software discussed (nearly thirty packages) in this document has only been reviewed by addressing the issue of functionality (a paper exercise) rather than practically assessing each product, by installing it and testing it for quality and other factors, such as ease of use by administrators and users.