“IBM showed an “open-source supercomputer” at the LinuxWorld
Expo, held earlier this month, that was built around a cluster of
Pentium II Xeon chips.”
“Using a subset of the Beowulf clustering technology, 17 of
IBM’s Netfinity servers containing 36 Pentium II chips and running
an off-the-shelf copy of Linux matched the scalability and
performance of a Cray supercomputer. The IBM system executed a
computer graphics-rendering application called the PovRay
benchmark.”
“In addition to the 17 servers, IBM used a 100MB Ethernet
network and hub to connect the servers, and a piece of parallel
computing software to ensure the system’s computations connected.
As for the copy of Red Hat’s Linux, IBM purchased it at a local
Barnes & Noble the day before the demonstration.”