Networks and MPI for cluster computing

Cluster computing, message passing, and high-performance networks form the foundation for high-performance computing and modern supercomputers. This chapter introduces the reader to the key concepts needed to understand how cluster computing differs from other types of distributed computing and provides a brief introduction to supercomputing. The material presented here is intended to be introduced in core computer science courses, alongside other parallel and distributed computing concepts. This information can be easily integrated into discussions of shared memory parallelism, and it serves as an example of methods for extreme parallelism that are needed for supercomputing.