Clustering has been existing since the 1980s when it was used in DEC's VMS systems. IBM's SYSLEX is a cluster approach for a mainframe system. Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, and other leading hardware and software companies offer clustering packages for scalability as well as availability. As availability or traffic assurance increases, all or a few parts of the cluster can be enlarged in number or size. Cluster computing can also be used as a relatively low-cost form of parallel processing for scientific and other applications that lend themselves to parallel operations
An early and well-known example was the project in which a number of off-the-shelf PCs were used to create a cluster for scientific applications.
Windows cluster is supported by the Moldex3D R7.1and by Symmetric Multiple Processors (SMP). While the users chose to initiate the parallel computing, the program will automatically partition one huge model into various individual domains and distribute them over different CPUs for computing. Every computer node will replace each other's computing data via message passing interface to get the final full model solution. The computing task is processed and parallel simultaneously. Thus, the overall computing time will be reduced greatly.