Most of the cluster systems today have master-slave with shared nothing kind of architecture. Hadoop is one of the frameworks for using cluster of computers and there are several other modifications. http://hadoop.apache.org/

It would be better if you can give a bit more details of what you are actually interested in.

ok ! I have to make differentiate among architecture of clusters, grids and clouds.

Cluster computing is a form distributed system in which many of the independent computers work closely to give performance of large supercomputers with comparatively lesser cost.

Grid computing is loosely coupled than clusters but still work together to accomplist bigger tasks

In Cloud computing huge pools of computing resources are allocated to users on demand

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9723040/what-is-the-difference-between-cloud-grid-and-cluster

http://www.cloud-competence-center.com/understanding/difference-cloud-cluster-grid/

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Differences_and_similarities_between_grid-cluster-and_cloud-computing

thanks siddhartha ! I am seeking some architectural details of these distributed systems.

Sudhakar,

you will find quite a lot of litterature out there if you search for the terms "Beowulf" and "MPI". I am supposing here that you are looking for number-crunching (High-Performance) clusters, and not High Availability - which would be another totally different use case.

Some "classical" places to start out are the web page at ClusterMonkey, http://clustermonkey.net/ , and the mailing list archives at Beowulf.org, http://beowulf.org/ .

As for the practical aspects of system engineering, I would suggest taking a look at the Centos and RedHat administrator documents, http://www.centos.org/docs/5/ and https://access.redhat.com/site/documentation/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/ . Quite a lot of this stuff is relevant to your query, both for High-Performance and for High-Availability.

Cheers,

-Alan

Searching by terms beowulf and mpi was very helpful and also the web-links. Thanks