Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: 16yearcycle who wrote (51926)	4/20/1999 9:09:00 PM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Respond to of 164684

Plugged In: Linux showing up in supercomputers By Therese Poletti SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Linux -- the renegade operating system that is among the hottest topics in Silicon Valley -- is also making its way into the most serious bastion of computing, the supercomputing world. Linux, developed by Finnish programmer Linus Torvalds in 1991, is given away over the Internet and managed by a far-flung group of programmers, part of what is known as the open source movement. Linux has been catching on among some corporations and Internet service providers as a reliable system to run Web servers or e-mail servers. Several high-performance computing centers, universities and government laboratories are also looking at Linux, inspired by its low cost, its development model of sharing software code and its closeness to Unix, the operating system typically preferred by engineers and serious computer designers. "Some of the supercomputing research community would like to start moving to Linux," said Irving Wladawsky-Berger, the general manager of International Business Machines Corp.'s Internet division and former head of the computer giant's supercomputing business. "In the high-end supercomputing world, everyone is a small community and that model (of open source software) is very appealing." Supercomputing represents a slow-growing $2.2 billion segment of the computer industry, where massive systems are now achieving speeds in excess of one teraflop: one trillion operations per second. They are used for scientific "grand challenges," such as weather forecasting, nuclear simulations, molecular modeling, and many other number-crunching intensive applications where machines can work on a problem for a week. While Linux is not yet running any of the ultrafast, teraflop-level machines, it is now being used by a few supercomputing centers in so-called clusters or superclusters. Scalable clustered systems are more powerful than a desktop workstation, but not quite as hefty as the multimillion-dollar supercomputers, the fastest computers in the world. Scalable means that they can add more processors, to improve performance or to add additional users. In 1994, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) pioneered the use of Linux for building extremely cheap clusters with a project called the Beowulf project, building very low-cost clusters with off-the-shelf computer parts. But these sprawling systems took up a lot of floor space and there was no computer maker to support the patched-together systems. So as funding is obtained, some of the high-performance computing centers are now buying cluster computers running Intel Pentium II processors -- the brains of a PC -- and the Linux operating system. Just last week, the Albuquerque High Performance Computing Center, located on the University of New Mexico campus, turned on a workstation supercluster system it calls Roadrunner, which basically consists of stacks of personal computer technology running multiple Intel Corp. Pentium II processors and Linux. Albuquerque bought its $400,000 system from a small, privately held company called Alta Technology Corp., based in Sandy, Utah, which develops clustered computer systems starting at $15,000, with either Intel processors or Digital's Alpha processor. Albuquerque's Roadrunner has 128 Intel Pentium II processors, running at speeds of 450 megahertz, similar to the massively parallel supercomputing systems which gang together multiple processors and distribute the work among the chips. "We are not trying to reinvent the supercomputer," said David Bader, an assistant professor of computer engineering at the University of New Mexico. "We hope to get maybe half the performance at 10 percent of the price." Albuquerque will be looking at environmental modeling, such as computing the climate in the Rio Grande corridor, and simulations on nuclear stockpiles under certain conditions a...