clusters definition of clusters in the Free Online Encyclopedia.

cluster, in astronomy: see star cluster star cluster, a group of stars near each other in space and resembling each other in certain characteristics that suggest a common origin for the group. Stars in the same cluster move at the same rate and in the same direction.
..... Click the link for more information. ; galaxy galaxy, large aggregation of stars , gas, and dust, typically containing billions of stars. Recognition that galaxies are independent star systems outside the Milky Way came from a study of the Andromeda Galaxy (1926–29) by Edwin P.
..... Click the link for more information. .

(1) Two or more systems working together. See clustering.

(2) Also called an "allocation unit" or "file allocation unit," it is some number of disk sectors that are treated as a unit. A cluster is the smallest unit of storage the operating system's file system can manage. That means if a 1KB file is stored in a system with a 32KB cluster (see table below), the 1KB file takes up 32KB of disk space. Following are the cluster sizes for the FAT file systems on Windows/DOS computers. See FAT, FAT32 and lost cluster.

                       FAT16
     Disk Size         Cluster size

        0-128MB         2KB
      128-256MB         4KB
      256-512MB         8KB
    512MB-1GB          16KB
        1-2GB          32KB

                       FAT32
    Disk Size          Cluster size

    512MB-8GB           4KB
        8-16GB          8KB
       16-32GB         16KB
       32GB+           32KB

1.	(architecture)	cluster - Multiple servers providing the same service. The term may imply resilience to failure and/or some kind of load balancing between the servers. Compare RAIS.
2.	(file system)	cluster - An elementary unit of allocation of a disk made up of one or more physical blocks. A file is made up of a whole number of possibly non-contiguous clusters. The cluster size is a tradeoff between space efficiency (the bigger is the cluster, the bigger is on the average the wasted space at the end of each file) and the length of the FAT.

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