John A. Turner writes "Haven't seen anything on /. about how much Linux-related stuff there was at Supercomputing '98 so thought I'd mention it. One of the best things was a panel discussion titled "Clusters, Extreme Linux, and NT". There's a nice summary of the Linux-related events at SC '98 at the Extreme Linux site " Note that reactions to Red Hat's support options announcements included One area in which Linux is far ahead of the pack is clustering . Has any participant written up a summary we could post? Update Rahul Dave has written a report for us.

The NSCA has done some not-very-novel research: build a cluster of computers and solve a parallelisable problem on it. The novelty? Well it runs on NT, so now Microsoft is crowing that NT is wonderfully scalable. As contributor Mark Harrison points out: "I figure if this NT cluster is using NT Server, which it must if it it is using more than 10 TCP/IP connections per node (I know nothing about these parallel systems, but with 124 two-processor nodes, each node must communicate with more than ten other nodes). NT server costs a bunch (about $1,000 per licence, I believe), so the cost is $124,000 for the OS. So much for their tagline, "High-Performance Supercomputing at Mail-Order Prices." How about "Save $123,975 on your supercomputer -- Use Extreme Linux." " Well... it might be time to help Ben Elliston who presented his encapsulation of IP in SCSI in August's Linux Journal which has a higher throughput than ethernet.

Frey Sigurjonsson sent us this Techweb story about the Avalon Beowulf cluster. By now we all know that this is the machine that scored in the top 500 super computers list. This is just a nice mainstream article about the about the 68 computer cluster that achieved 19.2 GFlops for a mere $150,000.

sasha e. writes "Wired.com has a nice story on Avalon, making interesting points about Beowulf as the future of supercomputing. Nice bit of pro-Linux in there as well.. "

starheight writes "Bill McColl has written an article contrasting traditional massively parallel supercomputing with a whole new generation of compute-intensive apps that require massively scalable architectures and can deliver both incredible throughput and real-time responsiveness when processing millions or billions of tasks."