With the explosive growth of the Internet, the workload on Internet servers, such as web and mail servers, is increasing so rapidly that they are very likely overloaded. Cluster systems, which consist of multiple computers interconnected by high speed...
With the explosive growth of the Internet, the workload on Internet servers, such as web and mail servers, is increasing so rapidly that they are very likely overloaded. Cluster systems, which consist of multiple computers interconnected by high speed networks, can solve such a problem by distributing work among the computers. As the price of powerful computers built on common off-the-shelf (COST) components is getting cheaper and high speed networks are more affordable, cluster systems based on COST have been actively researched and developed. In this paper we study two representative cluster systems based on COST components: Beowulf system developed by NASA CESDIS and MOSIX system by Hebrew University. We also study various Linux clustering techniques including NAT, IP Tunneling, and Direct Routing.