Special issue on unconventional cluster architectures and applications

Abstract

Cluster computing has gone a long way, and provided many contributions to science and industry. Important scientific contributions have been made possible by the use of the aggregated computing power of such clusters, for instance has cluster computing helped to verify the existence of dark matter back in the 1990s. Today, the vast majority of supercomputers are based on cluster architectures. Actually, High Performance Computing (HPC) based on clusters is pervasive today, and almost every product in its design phase has gone through a work flow based on HPC. Clusters provide a huge number of computing cores, starting with a few 100s but up to several millions, which are interconnected and work collaboratively on a single problem. As the need for more computational power is steadily increasing, the interest in faster clusters persists.