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Yeah. The fact that only the first page of the article was mirrored means I didn't get to see their notes on Myrinet or InfiniBand...which are the high-speed interconnects that the company I work for, Aspen Systems, generally use when building clusters. (This is in addition to a standard GigE network used as the "control" network, freeing up the high-speed network for application data. The part I'm responsible for, the management software, uses the control network exclusively.) I'm interested to see what they say about them.

Penguin Computing's still about.
Tatung seems to be making 1U Opteron rackmounts.
As does Aberdeen...
And Opteronics...
As is Aspen...

All of these vendors were found on the first page of a Google search of "1u opteron rackmount".

Of course, these aren't "major" players like HP, Dell, and IBM. Doesn't make the box any less reliable and you can buy support services from people like IBM, etc. for them anyhow.

You're way off, on several accounts. It's always fun to try and blame everything on corporate greed, but sometimes the facts just don't support it. Other posters have pointed out how Sun plans to use similar technology and how IBM plans to implement it. Do you think that they are just copying Intel blindly? They are all attacking the same problem: increasing throughput for fast CPUs. As you yourself pointed out, memory speed cannot come close to keeping up with modern CPUs. Increasing cache size is one way to combat this, but it is a very brute force way to do it. You increase the size, cost, and power consumption of the CPU when doing this. SMT and multi-core SMP systems allow for work to get done while waiting for memory to catch up. HT is just the tip of the iceberg, the stuff that Sun and IBM are working on is pretty amazing.

As for your knowledge of Intel, it is humorous at best. The Itanium was never meant to be the CPU of the future. It was never meant to be in home systems. It was designed to give Intel a way to compete with 64-bit servers that were all the rage in the late 90's. That's why Intel was willing to completely break with x86 instruction sets. If they were planning on trying to transition from PentiumXYZ to Itanium, then they would have never done that. Plus, for all its initial problems, the modern Itanium has put up some impressive numbers.

Scyld is a software company so they don't sell directly. To get a turnkey system they have partnered with hardware vendors who will sell a pre-integrated cluster along with hardware support and Scyld support for the integrated Beowulf Professional Edition software. Visit their site at:

Scyld Computing Corporation

Or go directly to their partners:

Compaq

PSSC Labs

Penguin Computing

eLinux

Aspen Systems

Custom Fit, Inc.

Atipa

Dan

• Compaq
• PSSC Labs
• Penguin Computing
• eLinux
• Aspen Systems
• Custom Fit, Inc.
• Atipa

Try Aspen Systems or Einux Network Solutions

Not sure how "out of the box" the Einux ones are, but you can get a 10 node dual-Athlon setup for around $25k.

There's an ad in the latest Embedded Linux Journal for a company called Aspen Systems (1-800-992-9242) advertising Beowulf clusters. Thtat's about the sum total of all I know about them ;).

- j

• http://www.microway.com/
• http://www.aspsys.com/
• http://www.swt.com/

The Press Release is at: linuxpr.com/releases/310.html and Aspen is at www.aspsys.com

HH