What Is a Cluster? What Is a Pod?

05/03/2021

Everything we do on the internet - which is just about everything we do these days - depends on the work of clusters, which are also called pods.

When we stream a hot new TV show, order a pair of jeans or Zoom with grandma, we use clusters. You're reading this story thanks to pods.

So, What Is a Cluster? What Is a Pod? A cluster or a pod is simply a set of computers linked by high-speed networks into a single unit.

Computer architects must have reached, at least unconsciously, for terms rooted in nature. Pea pods and dolphin superpods, like today's computer clusters, show the power of many individuals working as a team.

The Roots of Pods and Superpods The links go deeper. Botanists say pods not only protect and nourish individual peas, they can reallocate resources from damaged seeds to thriving ones. Similarly, a load balancer moves jobs off a failed compute node to a functioning one.

The dynamics aren't much different for dolphins.

Working off the coast of the Bahamas, veteran marine biologist Denise Herzing often sees every day the same pods, family groups of perhaps 20 dolphins. And once she encountered a vastly larger group.

Years ago, off the Baja peninsula, I saw a superpod. It was very exciting and a little overwhelming because as a researcher I want to observe a small group closely, not a thousand animals spread over a large area, said the founder of the Wild Dolphin Project.

For dolphins, superpods are vital. They protect the travelers by creating a huge sensory system, a thousand sets of ears that listen for predators like one super-sensor, she said, noting the parallels with the clusters used in cloud computing today.

A data center with multiple clusters or pods can span multiple buildings, and run as a single system. Pods Sprout in Early Data Centers As companies began computerizing their accounting systems in the early 1960s, they instinctively ganged multiple computers together so they would have backups in case one failed, according to Greg Pfister, a former IBM technologist and an expert on clusters.

I'm pretty sure NCR, MetLife and a lot of people did that kind of thing, said Pfister, author of In Search of Clusters, considered by some the bible of the field.

In May 1983, Digital Equipment Corp. packed several of its popular 32-bit VAX minicomputers into what it called a VAXcluster. Each computer ran its own operating system, but they shared other resources, providing IT users with a single system image.

Diagram of an early PC-based cluster. By the late 1990s, the advent of low-cost PC processors, Ethernet networks and Linux inspired at least eight major research projects that built clusters. NASA designed one with 16 PC motherboards on two 10 Mbit/second networks and dubbed it Beowulf, imagining it slaying the giant mainframes and massively parallel systems of the day.

Cluster Networks Need Speed Researchers found clusters could be assembled quickly and offered high performance at low cost, as long as they used high-speed networks to eliminate bottlenecks.

Another late 90's project, Berkeley's Network of Workstations (NoW), linked dozens of Sparc workstations on the fastest interconnects of the day. They created an image of a pod of small fish eating a larger fish to illustrate their work.

Researchers behind Berkeley's NoW project envisioned clusters of many small systems out-performing a single larger computer. One researcher, Eric Brewer, saw clusters were ideal for emerging internet apps, so he used the 100-server NoW system as a search engine.

For a while we had the best search engine in the world running on the Berkeley campus, said David Patterson, a veteran of NoW and many computer research projects at Berkeley.

The work was so successful, Brewer co-founded Inktomi, an early search engine built on a NoW-inspired cluster of 1,000 systems. It had many rivals, including a startup called Google with roots at Stanford.

They built their network clusters out of PCs and defined a business model that let them grow and really improve search quality - the rest was history, said Patterson, co-author of a popular textbook on computing.

Today, clusters or pods are the basis of most of the world's TOP500 supercomputers as well as virtually all cloud computing services. And most use NVIDIA GPUs, but we're getting ahead of the story.

Pods vs. Clusters: A War of Words While computer architects called these systems clusters, some networking specialists preferred the term pod. Turning the biological term into a tech acronym, they said POD stood for a point of delivery of computing services.

The term pod gained traction in the early days of cloud computing. Service providers raced to build ever larger, warehouse-sized systems often ordering entire shipping containers, aka pods, of pre-configured systems they could plug together like Lego blocks.

An early prototype container delivered to a cloud service provider. More recently, the Kubernetes group adopted the term pod. They define a software pod as a single container or a small number of containers that are tightly coupled and that share resources.

Industries like aerospace and consumer electronics adopted the term pod, too, perhaps to give their concepts an organic warmth. Among the most iconic examples are the iPod, the forerunner of the iPhone, and the single-astronaut vehicle from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.

When AI Met Clusters In 2012, cloud computing services heard the Big Bang of AI, the genesis of a powerful new form of computing. They raced to build giant clusters of GPUs that, thanks to their internal clusters of accelerator cores, could process huge datasets to train and run neural networks.

To help spread AI to any enterprise data center, NVIDIA packs GPU clusters on InfiniBand networks into NVIDIA DGX Systems. A reference architecture lets u

LINK:	https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/03/05/what-is-a-cluster-pod/...
	See more stories from nvidia

Most recent headlines

05/01/2027

Worlds first 802.15.4ab-UWB chip verified by Calterah and Rohde & Schwarz to be demoed at CES 2026

Worlds first 802.15.4ab-UWB chip verified by Calterah and Rohde & Schwarz to be ...

01/06/2026

Dolby Sets the New Standard for Premium Entertainment at CES 2026

January 6 2026, 05:30 (PST) Dolby Sets the New Standard for Premium Entertainment at CES 2026 Throughout the week, Dolby brings to life the latest innovatio...

02/05/2026

Dalet Flex LTS Delivers Smarter Search, Faster Editing, and an AI-Ready Foundation for Modern Media

Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, t...

01/05/2026

NBCUniversal's Peacock to Be First Streamer to Integrate Dolby's Full Suite of Premium Picture and Sound Innovations

January 5 2026, 18:30 (PST) NBCUniversal's Peacock to Be First Streamer to ...

01/04/2026

DOLBY AND DOUYIN EMPOWER THE NEXT GENERATON OF CREATORS WITH DOLBY VISION

January 4 2026, 18:00 (PST) DOLBY AND DOUYIN EMPOWER THE NEXT GENERATON OF CREATORS WITH DOLBY VISION Douyin Users Can Now Create And Share Videos With Stun...

18/03/2026

Net Insight Names Larissa GrnerMeeus CPO

Newly named chief product officer (CPO), Larissa G rner Meeus will return to Net Insight on May 4. Larissa G rner Meeus will become CPO of Net Insight on May 4...

18/03/2026

SVG Europe's The Football Summit 2026: Select Sessions Now Available to Watch on SVG PLAY

SVG Europe's The Football Summit 2026 explored how the sports broadcasting i...

18/03/2026

SVG's SportsTech@NABShow Blog Goes Live as Countdown to Vegas Heats Up

The 2026 NAB Show kicks off one month from today and SVG is once again set to cover the show from every angle. SVG's SportsTech@NAB Show Blog is now live - ...

18/03/2026

The Premiere of Dead Lover Showcases Grave Robbing and Sex With a Giant Finger

(L-R) The cast and crew of Dead Lover at The Ray Theater for its premiere at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. (Photo by Robin Marshall/Shutterstock for Sundan...

18/03/2026

Music Row Piano from Wiltone Productions

Yamaha C7 captured in Nashville Wiltone Productions have announced the release of Music Row Piano, a deeply sampled Yamaha C7 piano library that's been ...

18/03/2026

Techivation introduce T-Warmer Mk2

Bass-enhancement plug-in upgraded Along with a steady stream of new releases, Techivation have recently been revisiting some of the older plug-ins in their ...

18/03/2026

Tonal Balance Control 3 from iZotope

Mix-reference plug-in overhauled iZotope's powerful mix-referencing plug-in has just reached its third major version, and now boasts a new capture proce...

18/03/2026

Toontrack Transistor Organ EKX

Latest EZKeys 2 expansion arrives Toontrack's staggering collection of EZKeys 2 expansions has grown once again, and the latest instalment delivers a on...

18/03/2026

Jess Ho explores the politics of food in new SBS Audio podcast For The Culture

Jess Ho explores the politics of food in new SBS Audio podcast For The Culture 18 March, 2026 Media releases New SBS Audio podcast For The Culture, hosted ...

18/03/2026

Future-ready broadcasts with ATSC 3.0 and enhanced services from Rohde & Schwarz at NAB 2026

Future-ready broadcasts with ATSC 3.0 and enhanced services from Rohde & Schwarz...

18/03/2026

LCTWS 2026

London Calling - When The Industry Convened to Help Streaming Find its MoJo In this blog, Laura Rognoni reflects on key discussions from the Connected TV World...

18/03/2026

SMPTE Unveils 2026 NAB Show Educational Presentations

SMPTE Unveils 2026 NAB Show Educational Presentations Brie Clayton March 18, 2026 0 Comments SMPTE , the home of media professionals, technologists, a...

18/03/2026

Auditel Ad Campaign Shot on Blackmagic PYXIS 12K

Auditel Ad Campaign Shot on Blackmagic PYXIS 12K Brie Clayton March 18, 2026 0 Comments LED wall virtual production blends 12K open gate acquisition w...

18/03/2026