InfoWorld: Big Blue's open-source computer beats Cray

"IBM showed an "open-source supercomputer'' at the LinuxWorld Expo, held earlier this month, that was built around a cluster of Pentium II Xeon chips."

"Using a subset of the Beowulf clustering technology, 17 of IBM's Netfinity servers containing 36 Pentium II chips and running an off-the-shelf copy of Linux matched the scalability and performance of a Cray supercomputer. The IBM system executed a computer graphics-rendering application called the PovRay benchmark."

"In addition to the 17 servers, IBM used a 100MB Ethernet network and hub to connect the servers, and a piece of parallel computing software to ensure the system's computations connected. As for the copy of Red Hat's Linux, IBM purchased it at a local Barnes & Noble the day before the demonstration."

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