[ale] Linux on a supercomputer

[Vernard Martin]

> No offense, but since when is a Sparcstation 20 a supercomputer, or
> even a "supercomputer"???  

The term "supercomputer" has been much maligned as of late since the cpu
and memory bandwidth capacities that used to only be availabe in
tradditional supercomputers is now available in workstation style machines.
Even the most prominent conference on SuperComputing (which used to be
calledd simply "Supercomputing 'XY where XY were the current year ala
Win95) has stopped using the term and simply goes by SC'XY. So what is a
supercomputer is definitely in the eye of the beholder. I personally like
the definition that a supercomputer is a computer that by the time you
finish paying for it, it is 3 generations behind current technology :-)
  
> Still - it's cool to be able to do something like this with a free os.  I
> seem to remember a project (Beowulf) to do something like that.  Was Alan
> Cox involved in that, or is this too recent for him?  Perhaps he is
> working on doing this with 8088 Linux (ELKS) and calling it Grendel?

The philosphy of a Network of Workstations = Supercomputer has been around
fora while. Many projects use Linux as the base OS for projects such as
this simply because in most cases, you can run it on relatively cheap Intel
hardware and you have the entire source code available to hack. However,
this is somewhat countered by the fact that usually if use only Linux then
you have to prove that the quality of the OS does not drastically affect the
results you are getting. In other words, you have to do it on another
platform as well and compare them just to have folks accept it. This isn't
true for most commercial unices. If you do your work on a Sun running
Solaris 2.X most folks will assume that you are making sense. This attitude
is slowly changing but currently is still a hindrance.

just my thoughts

V
--
Vernard Martin, College of Computing Systems Research Laboratory
(vernard at cc.gatech.edu) http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~vernard/
College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332
"The truth is a three-edged sword: Your side, their side and the real truth."