Clustering

Clustering has two different meanings in computer science:

1. In computer hardware, clustering is the connection of many low-cost computers using special software such that they can be used as one larger computer. Clustering can either be used to provide reliability (when one machines fails, the others takes over its workload) or as a means to inexpensively provide large amounts of computing power.
2. In machine learning, clustering is an algorithm that takes a data set of inputs and divides them into equivalence classes, so that every input in a class is "similar" in some way.