Great article, just wondering - you ended with "The next tour leaves in 30 minutes". Does that mean you'll give us another similar tour about a different part of the linux operating system...? »

Sounds like an awesome machine. Here at Haverford College, we just recently got a similar machine from Angstrom with Opterons. It runs pretty hot (we had to re-do the hvac for the lab its kept in) and seems louder than the Tyan though it supports more cores (we currently have 48 and room for 2x with dual core). The thing that seems nicest about the Tyan though is that it is even more compact than our Angstrom and can still be fairly powerful. I really like things like this that can help bring high performance computing to smaller institutions. As for the software, we've found (after a little bit of configuration work) that the easiest route to go is to use passwordless ssh, ntp, nfs, torque/maui, and open-mpi. All open source solution! If you can get a few bugs out, you can probably get a full cluster up and running in a matter of a few days this way. »