[ Thanks to Russ Foster
for this link. ]
“Dr. Gotthard Sághi-Szabó, one of the laboratory’s
research scientists, and Dr. Alan Boss, an astrophysicist at
Carnegie’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM), knew they
could take advantage of clustering. The innovative software
technology delivers supercomputer-like performance and reliability
by linking a number of computers and leveraging inexpensive,
off-the-shelf hardware. They also knew open-source Alpha-based
subsystems would maximize value and performance for an academic
institution watching expenditures. Puget Sound Data Systems, a
reseller based in Bothell, Washington, and a top provider of Alpha
systems to government and universities, worked with the Carnegie
Institution to build the Linux Beowulf cluster.”
“We needed a fast, 64-bit processor, especially for the
memory-bandwidth hungry, floating-point, intensive operations our
complex computations demand,” said Sághi-Szabó. “API
NetWorks not only provided the highest performance solution — we
tested it here in our labs directly against Intel’s — but also the
most affordable, making it the obvious choice. I’m very satisfied
with the price/performance ratio, and the money we are spending
could not have even come close to the cost of a supercomputer.”
Based on Saghi-Szabo’s research, the institution estimate that
using the Alpha/Linux solution saved them over one million
dollars.”