[ Thanks to Matt for
this link. ]
“Until now, most high-performance computing clusters were
hand-built affairs found mainly in large universities, lovingly
designed by enthusiastic professors and tended by sleep-deprived
graduate students. But now Dell–which was appropriately enough
started in a dorm room–has begun to commercialize the HPC
(high-performance computing) market, offering pre-configured
supercomputer clusters that combine everything from the servers to
racks to software integration.“Thus, now you can buy an eight-node 16-processor HPC cluster
off the shelf from Dell, for only $130,000 plus shipping and
applicable sales tax but you’ll have to phone in the order, because
Dell doesn’t yet offer HPC clusters from its Web site. Cables are
included, but on-site ‘rack and stack’ service costs extra…”