"load-balancing" clusters are configurations in which cluster-nodes share computational workload to provide better overall performance. for example, a web server cluster may assign different queries to different nodes, so the overall response time will be optimized. however, approaches to load-balancing may significantly differ among applications, e.g. a high-performance cluster used for scientific computations would balance load with different algorithms from a web-server cluster which may just use a simple round-robin method by assigning each new request to a different node.