“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.