FLOPS are dirt cheap right now. How excited should you really be though?

Here is your challenge. You have a need for speed, your current computing power is insufficient for the task at hand. You have some large number of calculations to perform, and very little time to achieve this goal. Can you solve this problem? Cost effectively? Quickly?

Cisco High-Performance Computing InfiniBand and Ethernet Networks and the IBM System Cluster 1350 Lowers Costs, Improves Systems and Halves ROI Period

Intel Cluster Ready and Intel Connects Cables help simplify cluster use and deployment as high-performance computing use expands from academic and scientific realms to more mainstream use in data centers.

Now that all of the major processor vendors have introduced multi-core chips, the impact of this relatively new technology on high-performance computing should to be addressed. What will is the immediate impact on HPC application development? And what will "many-cores" ultimately mean for the future of the HPC cluster?

Just like there are "Urban Legends" that never seem to die, so it seems there are "Cluster Urban Legends" that persist even today. We have all seen or heard them. As a service to those entering the cluster HPC (High Performance Computing) community, we dispel some of the more popular tales. (Read: misconceptions.)

The University of Kentucky has acquired a new IBM supercomputer that places the university's research capability among the nation's leaders for public and private university research computing.

An often asked question by new HPC cluster users is, What kind of interconnects (networks) are available? This question is important because the network is perhaps the single most important factor in terms of cluster performance. GigE, 10 GigE, Infiniband: Which one is right for you?

Tyan's PSC comes packed with forty cores, Infiniband, and much more inside the cube than at first meets the eye.

What’s stopping clusters from being useful tools?

Confronting multi-core anxiety and what the new processors mean for the future of commodity clusters.

Read the HPC tea leaves and see what the future of high-performance computing holds in store.

IBM announced today new initiatives designed to make it easier for clients to use "clusters" of servers for high-performance computing tasks.

A powerful little package to eliminate the details of communication and data distribution on distributed memory systems -- like, say, Linux clusters.

Got performance? A simple test provides a peek into the AMD and Intel Dual-core processor designs.

As the new Intel Xeons hit the street, our resident HPC expert spends two weeks with sixteen cores.

In a world of rack-em and stack-em clusters and grids, DAS-3 is implementing a new solution that redefines the concept of both clusters and grids.

While implementing and managing a powerful and complex cluster environment can seem like a daunting task, you can make your life much easier and your users more productive by sticking to a few simple rules. Here’s a guide.

To date, the Message Passing Interface has been instrumental in simplifying application development for clusters. But as clusters change to embrace multiple cores, multiple platforms, and multiple advanced interconnects, MPI is no longer adequate. What can replace it? Donald Becker asks, “How about Unix?

Learn how to setup a Linux cluster without touching the machines’ installed operating system.

While a Linux cluster offers a cost-effective alternative for numerous enterprise and technical computing applications, its price/performance for high-performance computing (HPC) applications can be substantially worse. Why?

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.

Last month's "Extreme Linux" introduced MPI-2, the latest Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard. MPI has become the preferred programming interface for data exchange -- called message passing -- for parallel, scientific programs. MPI has evolved since the MPI-1.0 standard was released in May 1994. The MPI-1.1 standard, produced in 1995, was a significant advance, and the MPI-2 standard clarifies and corrects the MPI-1.1 standard while preserving forward compatibility with MPI-1.1. A valid MPI-1.1 program is a valid MPI-2 program.

A Linux Virtual Server cluster is a highly-scalable and highly-available network service cluster built on a set of real servers. Here's how they work, and how you can set one up yourself.

Last month's column introduced Condor and presented a sample installation of the software package in a cluster environment. Condor is a system that creates a "high-throughput computing" environment by effectively utilizing computing resources from a pool of cluster nodes and disparate workstations distributed around a network. Like many batch queuing systems, Condor provides a queuing mechanism, scheduling policy, job priority scheme, and resource classification. Unlike most other batch systems, Condor doesn't require dedicated compute servers.

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.

Linux clusters have become so successful that they've proliferated internationally through research labs, universities, and large industries that require an inexpensive source of high performance computing cycles. Developers and users have pushed the technology by scaling their applications to more and more processors so that larger problems can be solved more quickly. This has resulted in clusters where some applications can actually become I/O bound -- the input/output of data to/from a large number of processors limits the performance of the application.

From predicting the weather to keeping your e-commerce Web site running 24/7, nothing does the trick like a cluster of Linux systems. We show you what clusters can do,