New Zealand Herald: Doyle Sails goes with the high-tech [Linux] flow

"Westhaven sailmaker Doyle Sails has taken a technological leap forward by developing a program which calculates the way air will flow around sails...."

"To do the task within a limited budget, the team built a Linux supercomputer by clustering eight PCs, each with two Celeron processors running at just under 500MHz. The entire cluster cost $15,000. In contrast, the Linux clusters Weta Digital is using to render graphics for the Lord of the Rings films, which use SGI hardware, are costing about $15,000 a processor."

"The application is written in C++, Fortran, an open source HTML (hypertext markup language) form generator called Zope to create the internet front end, and it sits on an open-source Postgresql database."

Editor's note: you can see a demonstration version here.

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