On June 14, at Sandia National Laboratories, the 350 node
Cplant98 cluster running Linux achieved 125.2 GFLOPS. (see http://www.cs.sandia.gov/cplant/.
Under the heading 'Info' click on 'News'). That would currently
place the Cplant cluster as #53 on the current TOP 500 list (
http://www.top500.org ). This
will not be the position the cluster gets on the next edition of
the list as it's not due until November. But I think it's safe to
assume that we now have a machine running Linux as a solid top 100
contender in the TOP 500 list.
On the question whether Cplant is another Beowulf machine, the
FAQ says: "Not really. The Cplant project has some broader goals
than traditional Beowulf systems. We are not trying to build a
machine for a small number of users to run a small number of
applications on a small number of machines. We are trying to build
a production machine for hundreds of users to run all types of
parallel applications on potentially thousands of nodes. We are
essentially trying to build a commodity-based machine patterned
after the design of the Intel TeraFLOPS machine."