1. A symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) computing system comprising: a plurality of SMP nodes tightly coupled together to form a cluster, each SMP node including: one or more multi-core processors; memory, partitioned into a local and global partition, with the global partitions together forming a single global memory accessible by all processors in the cluster; a communication adapter supporting data rates of at least 40 Gb/s and remote direct memory access (RDMA).