The last word on the Linux World Conference and Expo turned out to be: clustering. IBM used the show as a platform to demonstrate what it called an open-source supercomputer. This was cobbled together from a cluster of 36 Pentium II Xeon microprocessors in 17 Netfinity servers, all running a subset of Beowulf, the Linux clustering software. Big Blue says the resulting beast matched the performance of a Cray supercomputer on the PovRay graphics- rendering benchmark.
The main difference between the two is that a Cray would have cost $5.5 million or so, whereas the Netfinity/Linux hybrid set IBM back a mere $150,000. It’s a neat trick but it had been done already, by a group of scientists at Los Alamos who called their cut-price 140-node supercomputer Avalon (CI No 3,509). Meanwhile Tokyo, Japan-based Pacific HiTech announced its own TurboLinux cluster server, boasting load balancing and IP masquerading and priced from $1,995 for two machines.
