Linux on high-performance computing clusters seems an obvious choice now, but it wasn't a forgone conclusion when Thomas Sterling and Donald Becker used Linux to build the world's first Beowulf cluster in 1999. Linux has come a long way since then. Learn why Linux has put "super" back into supercomputers.

Clusters of every size experience failures: processors can die, hard disks often crash, and interface cards have been known to produce spurious errors. Of course, software can fail, too, for any number of reasons. Prevention is a necessity, but the next best option is to react and respond to faults as they occur. If you're a cluster developer, Fault Tolerant MPI (FT-MPI) can help keep your compute jobs humming.

Traditional interprocess communication requires cooperation and synchronization between sender and receiver. MPI-2's new remote memory access features allow one process to update or interrogate the memory of another, hence the name one-sided communication. Here's a hands-on guide.

After almost two decades of working with computers, I want to give it up. Instead, I want to become a plumber. Plumbers have it made.

In this installment, I'd like to touch on an oft-forgotten but increasingly important component of the Linux desktop: Java applications. Since Java is largely distribution neutral, what Java code works on Fedora Core works for Debian, Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake, and any number of other distributions. And, yes, Java applications really do exist, and some are actually good.

Linux offers several excellent music players, including (but not limited to) XMMS, Zinf, noatun, amaroK, Juk, Rhythmbox, and Kaffeine. Most of these can play streaming Internet audio, compact discs, and best of all, digital audio files. With music stored as digital audio files, you can enjoy your music wherever and whenever you want to.

Do you administer multiple distributions and find it frustrating that you can find packages for some distros and not others? Have you ever tried looking for a .rpm only to find a .deb (or vice versa)? Sometimes, Linux can be maddening.

Linux often gives you lots of ways to do the same thing and file transfer is no exception. We covered file transfer in three columns from March to May 2003 (available online at http://www.linux-mag.com/depts/power.html). This month let's look at yet another variation using gFTP and some not-so-obvious details that can help you navigate all of the file transfer protocols.

The mayor of Munich, Germany, Christian Ude, recently found a creative way to focus worldwide attention on the unavoidable conflict between the current "business as usual" patent system, which favors large corporations, and the innovative business models and greater customer choices made possible by Linux and its open source licensing model. It may be surprising that a municipality, even one as large as Munich, finds itself at the forefront of a worldwide political and financial debate about open source software, but Ude understands what's at stake, and succeeded in translating the often confusing and ideologically charged conflict into something even non-developers can understand: taxpayers' money.

If you want to make money with your web site, running advertisements is a good, first approach. Running ads requires little or no capital expense, and there are several options to sell ad space: you can sell it directly; you can hire a salesperson or consultant to sell it; or you can sign up with an ad network, which matches advertisers with your site.

Last month, we looked at MySQL's new storage engine, NDB (also known as NDBCluster or MySQL Cluster). Now it's time to look at the compilation, installation, and configuration process.

If you've used Linux for a long time, you're probably quite familiar with file permissions. Indeed, managing permissions is a critical part of managing a Linux system.

As I mentioned last month, having persistent Perl code means that some steps of your application can be reused rather than repeated. One very easy optimization is keeping your database handles open between web hits, rather than reopening them on each new hit. The Apache::DBI module (found in the CPAN) does the work for you by altering the way normal DBI connections are processed.