MySQL 9.0 Release Notes
Even before design of NDBCLUSTER
began in 1996, it was evident that one of the major problems to be
encountered in building parallel databases would be communication
between the nodes in the network. For this reason,
NDBCLUSTER was designed from the very
beginning to permit the use of a number of different data
transport mechanisms, or transporters.
NDB Cluster supports three of these (see
Section 25.2.1, “NDB Cluster Core Concepts”). A fourth transporter,
Scalable Coherent Interface (SCI), was also supported in very old
versions of NDB. This required specialized
hardware, software, and MySQL binaries that are no longer
available.