最近，運用叢集式電腦系統搭配Linux作業系統與PVM或MPI訊息傳遞程式庫，來執行高速計算(或平行計算)已經逐漸走到實際可行的階段。本論文陳述本實驗室所建構的一套以一台主機與8台對稱式多處理機系統(16顆處理器)的無磁碟從節點之個人電腦叢集，並簡介叢集式平行系統架構、設定、軟體工具以及相關應用。

A cluster is a collection of independent and cheap machines, used together as a supercomputer to provide a solution. In traditional scalable computing clusters, there is related high powered Intel or AMD based PC’s associated with several gigabytes of hard disk space spread around. As far as a cluster administrator is concerned, the installer may have to install an operating system and related software for each cluster node. Every node (excluding the Server) is equipped without any hard disk and is booted from the network. Since it has booted successfully, it works as same as a fully equipped one. We will explain how to set up a diskless cluster for computing purpose. In this paper, a SMP-based PC cluster consists of one master node and eight diskless slave nodes (16 processors), is proposed and built. The system architecture and benchmark performances of the cluster are also presented in this paper.