Why do people like clusters so much?

[jackg]

I've been thinking recently that instead of having a supercomputer, a lot of universities and similar organisations have moved to making computer clusters which is where you split computation between many computers that are identical(ish). This makes for an inherant latency being caused due to the computers being spread wide apart from one another. The benefits of this (one of them at least) is that the heat can be removed from them much more readily although I'm thinking that that's quite a high price to pay for the added latency or am I missing something?

[Jet Cash]

Isn't this similar to mining pools?

[jackg]

Isn't this similar to mining pools?

Ish but its a bit different. I think that's a different sort of cluster though. As with the general schematics the computers have to be identical so that they can run faster and share an operating system...