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cworley submitted - several times - this well-linked submission about a slightly boring topic - fast computers. "Top500.org has just released its latest list of the world's fastest supercomputers (updated twice yearly). For the first time, Linux Beowulf clusters have joined the teraFLOP club, with six new clusters breaking the teraFLOP barrier. Two Linux clusters now rank in the Top 10: Lawrence Livermore's "MCR" (built by Linux NetworX ) ranks #5 achieving 5.694 teraFLOP/s, and Forecast Systems Laboratory's "Jet" (built by HPTi) ranks #8 reaching 3.337 TeraFLOP/s. Other Linux clusters surpassing the teraFLOP/s barrier include: LSU's "SuperMike" at #17 (from Atipa ), the University at Buffalo at #22 and Sandia National Lab at #32 (both from Dell ), an Itanium cluster for British Petroleum Houston at #42 (from HP ), and Argonne National Labs at #46 (from Linux NetworX ) reached just over the one teraFLOP/s mark with 361 processors. In the previous Top500 list compiled last June, the fastest Intel based Netfinity 1024 processor clusters from IBM were sub-teraFLOP/s and the University of Heidelberg's AMD based "HELICS" cluster (built by Megware ) held the top tux rank at #35 with 825 GFLOP/s."

There's been much rumbling, but it looks official: LinSight and LinDeveloper (the sites operated by Dave Whitiger and Atipa have shut down. They decided that it wasn't an efficient use of resources... on the positive side, LinEvents (a Linux Events calendar which was the most useful part of the site) will continue. No word on what Dave's gonna do now, but somehow I don't think he'll return to LinuxToday ;)

Dave Whitinger, formerly of LinuxToday fame, now from Atipa wrote in to tell us that "Soros Private Equity Partners, TA Associates, and WR Hambrecht + Co. have invested more than $30 million in Atipa Linux Solutions. " Also, if you haven't seen Dave's Linsight service, you should check it out. I've been wanting to hack something like that together for years, but now I don't have to ;)