eWeek: Supercomputers for the Masses?

“HPCCs look completely different from traditional
supercomputers: They are fan-cooled, not water-cooled, and they sit
in racks and use off-the-shelf components. And while the inventor
of supercomputers—Cray Research
Inc.—may have cranked out only two or three computers
a year a decade ago, companies including Dell Computer Corp., Red
Hat Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are now building hundreds of
postmodern supercomputers at a time.

“The changes in supercomputing can be seen most clearly in
academia, where the New Age supercomputers are commonly used.

“eWEEK Labs recently visited Stanford University, in Stanford,
Calif., which was setting up a 300-node cluster comprising Dell
systems running Red Hat Linux. The goal is to use the cluster at
Stanford’s Bio-X—a massive, state-of-the-art facility
funded predominantly by Jim Clark of Silicon Graphics Inc. fame.
The role of Bio-X is to bring together the different
sciences—including engineering, physics, medicine and
biology—so researchers can better share resources,
planning and data…”

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