This project has three goals: <br/>1. To develop, by doing, a clear understating on how to parallelize an algorithm for distributed processing  using OpenMPI for communication.   2. To gain a better understanding of the effects of scale on the performance of distributed processing by  conducting and analyzing scalability studies on various degrees of parallelism and data set sizes.  3. To obtain exposure to, and an appreciation for, a common realKworld clustering problem , because  cluster analysis represents an important class of problem  in various domains including, but not limited  to, data mining and statistical data analysis.