NDB Cluster Programs differently as well. For this reason, it is considered a separate transport mechanism for NDB Cluster. See Section 23.3.3.11, “NDB Cluster TCP/IP Connections Using Direct Connections” , for details. • Shared memory (SHM) . For more information about SHM, see Section 23.3.3.12, “NDB Cluster Shared- Memory Connections” . •  Scalable Coherent Interface (SCI) . Note Using SCI transporters in NDB Cluster requires specialized hardware, software, and MySQL binaries not available with NDB 8.0. Most users today employ TCP/IP over Ethernet because it is ubiquitous. TCP/IP is also by far the best- tested transporter for use with NDB Cluster. Regardless of the transporter used,  NDB  attempts to make sure that communication with data node processes is done using chunks that are as large as possible since this benefits all types of data transmission. 23.4 NDB Cluster Programs Using and managing an NDB Cluster requires several specialized programs, which we describe in this chapter. We discuss the purposes of these programs in an NDB Cluster, how to use the programs, and what startup options are available for each of them. Information about the program  ndb_setup.py  (now deprecated), used to start the NDB Cluster Auto- Installer, is also included in this section. You should be aware that Section 23.4.26, “ndb_setup.py — Start browser-based Auto-Installer for NDB Cluster (DEPRECATED)” , contains information about the command- line client only; for information about using the GUI installer spawned by this program to configure and deploy an NDB Cluster, see The NDB Cluster Auto-Installer (NDB 7.5) (No longer supported). These programs include the NDB Cluster data, management, and SQL node processes ( ndbd ,  ndbmtd , ndb_mgmd , and  mysqld ) and the management client ( ndb_mgm ). For information about using  mysqld  as an NDB Cluster process, see Section 23.5.9, “MySQL Server Usage for NDB Cluster” . Other  NDB  utility, diagnostic, and example programs are included with the NDB Cluster distribution. These include  ndb_restore ,  ndb_show_tables , and  ndb_config . These programs are also covered in this section. The final portion of this section contains tables of options that are common to all the various NDB Cluster programs. 23.4.1 ndbd — The NDB Cluster Data Node Daemon ndbd  is the process that is used to handle all the data in tables using the NDB Cluster storage engine. This is the process that empowers a data node to accomplish distributed transaction handling, node recovery, checkpointing to disk, online backup, and related tasks. In an NDB Cluster, a set of  ndbd  processes cooperate in handling data. These processes can execute on the same computer (host) or on different computers. The correspondences between data nodes and Cluster hosts is completely configurable. Options that can be used with  ndbd  are shown in the following table. Additional descriptions follow the table. 4237