To: Paul Engel who wrote (115535 ) 11/1/2000 2:47:57 PM From: Tony Viola Read Replies (3) | Respond to Paul, Tony, not Ten here. Anyway, the Cornell supercomputer article is interesting. The techniques used to build up supercomputer power out of the building blocks they mention, clustering, has been around for a while. The term scaling out, to describe how the processing power is built up is mentioned below. This is vs. scale up, where you add processors to a single footprint SMP machine, like a Sun UE1000. Scale out-add servers via a Giganet type switch technology, horizontally, onto the cluster.This method for building super computers, known as clustering, uses industry-standard computer equipment like Dell servers, Intel Pentium® Processors, Windows® 2000 from Microsoft, and networking technology from Giganet® as building blocks to group computers into clusters for increased power, performance, and reliability of the individual systems. The advantage of this industry standard approach is that it ends up significantly less expensive than building one large, custom-engineered system. Another benefit is that owners of these newer clustered systems can increase their power simply by adding another computer to the cluster.
