Chapter 3 Building a Cluster

The purpose of this chapter is to allow readers to have a taste of cluster computing without taking a lot of effort to find a cluster.

A virtual machine cluster is a poor man's solution. While building a virtual machine cluster, you act as a cluster administrator who has the full control of the nodes.

One can also rent a cluster from Amazon's EC2. This allows you to scale up the ideas we tested on a virtual machine cluster.

TODO: Any other cluster platforms?

In the later chapters, we will show how to deploy Hadoop, Tessera, Spark, and SupR on each cluster platform.

Virtual Machine Cluster

Purdue Clusters

Amazon AWS

[This post](http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Cluster-HOWTO-4.html#ss4.3) may be a good reference for building a real cluster.