Just a short ten years ago, "big iron" ruled the world of high performance computing. But by combining then-nascent technologies -- the PC, Ethernet, and Linux -- Dr. Thomas Sterling and others created the Beowulf cluster, forever shifting the accepted norms and economies of high performance computing. Here, Dr. Sterling gives a personal account of the rise of the Linux commodity cluster.

While building a Beowulf cluster is cheap, estimating the true costs of acquiring an entire cluster can sometimes be a headache. Duke University's Dr. Robert G. Brown describes what you need to know before writing a proposal -- or a check -- for your first Beowulf.

Scientific model developers often need to combine or couple existing models. In this feature story, Linux Magazine's "Extreme Linux" columnist Forrest Hoffman shows how to couple parallel models without a toolkit.

In the past several months, a good number of corporate, government, academic, and research institutions -- Pixar, the Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Shell E&P, and others -- have announced the installation of substantial, high performance Linux computing clusters. In the case of LLNL, for example, the largest of its three new clusters (built by Linux Networx) is composed of 252 Pentium 4 processors, capable of a theoretical peak of 857 gigaflops, making it one of the fastest clusters ever built. In the case of Pixar, a 1,024-processor blade cluster (using 2.8 GHz Xeons) from RackSaver is replacing the company's existing Sparc-based render farm.

Imagine having a Linux distribution that uses the latest open source software, auto-detects all of your hardware, and doesn't cost a dime. Now imagine that it can also be run completely from a CD, yet still contain full-blown desktop applications such as KDE, OpenOffice, KOffice, and so on.

While email and instant messaging are great ways to stay in touch -- and are nearly ubiquitous -- those "killer apps" are just a little dull. After all, why send email to your brother when you can just as easily reach out and "frag" him?

How can you start a job from one system and finish it on another? For example:

As users and system administrators, we fight spam (unsolicited bulk e-mail) every day. For instance, it's not uncommon these days to receive more spam than legitimate email. What's worse, the amount of spam traversing the Internet has grown substantially every year for the past several years. Indeed, spam is becoming a threat to the Internet. The mail servers of ISPs are becoming overburdened, forcing ISPs to buy more hardware and pay for more bandwidth just to handle spam. Spam has become such a serious problem that a conference on the subject was held recently in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

While most large organizations already have a search feature on their web site, many small- and medium-sized organizations do not. For whatever reason, there's long been a perception that getting good search results on your web site is complicated or expensive. This month's column begins a two-part series about adding search features to your web site.

Now that Sun officially supports Linux with each new version of the Java 2 Software Development Kit (JDK), you might assume that no other tools are needed to code Java on your favorite OS. After all, the JDK is a free (as in beer) download (available from http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.1) that fully supports the Java language and the ever-expanding Java 2 class library, and the command-line interpreter, compiler, and debugger are capable tools used by thousands of programmers. In fact, many of the latest Linux implementations bundle the Sun JDK.

More and more these days, you get faced with a problem with angle brackets somewhere in the data. How do you find what you're looking for in HTML or XML data?

Yes, there are simpler, albeit less flexible solutions available. One possibility is zebedee (http://www.winton.org.uk/zebedee). Designed by Neil Winton and based on the Blowfish (http://www.counterpane.com/blowfish.html) encryption algorithm, zebedee is a lighter-weight, secure tunneling application. While zebedee does require a couple of libraries to run, the zebedee package includes the libraries and the install is very simple to perform. The current stable release of zebedee is 2.4.1, and is provided as Linux RPMs and as a Windows install package.