Like multiprocessor systems, but multiple systems working together
Usually sharing storage via a storage-area network (SAN)
Provides a high-availability service which survives failures
Asymmetric clustering has one machine in hot-standby mode
Symmetric clustering has multiple nodes running applications, monitoring each other
Some clusters are for high-performance computing (HPC)
Applications must be written to use parallelization
Some have distributed lock manager (DLM) to avoid conflicting operations