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Clustermatic is Scyld-but-free.

Oh, and for kicks, check out our cluster-building workshop.

This guy seems to have it right:

"Suppose you create and design feature X into your chipset. You might find, via a lawsuit, that feature X is patented by company Y. I've talked to vendors who would like to open their hardware but are scared to do so for this very reason -- they might have designed a patented feature into their hardware without realizing it."

Your concern is touching, but unnecessary. The LinuxBIOS project at heart is run by the CCS-1 division of Los Alamos National Laboratory and is pretty well funded thanks to the success of various government clustering projects which use LinuxBIOS (Lightning, Orange, Pink, and a couple others). Of course, much code is contributed through private companies like Linux Networks, Tyan, Linux Labs, etc, but LANL is like LinuxBIOS-HQ.

Having said that, the best way you could help would be to help out with documentation and tell your friends about the project. The mailing list is a great resource, but hardly place for a beginner to start. Best of all, writing documentation wouldn't cost you a penny and you'd probably learn a great deal from it :)

This simply means it is time for more people to contribute to the following Open Source BIOS projects:

See: LinuxBIOS and
Open BIOS.

Also of interest is this announcement of an Open Source BIOS that successfully booted Windows 2000. (It also boots Linux and OpenBSD.) This was in November of 2002, so there may have been more progress since. They also got help from the bochs project.

Sign up to help these teams today!

...is that AMD opened their platform well enough to the LinuxBIOS developers while Intel basically told them to screw off and live with EFI. Here is what Ron Minnich had to say earlier on the LinuxBIOS mailing list.

Pink is the largest LinuxBIOS cluster in the world to date. The only moving parts in each node are cooling fans. This translates into a small savings on hardware, but more importantly means the nodes are by design more reliable thanks to fewer moving parts. Each node is powered by two 2.4GHz Xeon processors with four gigs of RAM and Myrinet 2000 interconnects.

The raw hardware power, while impressive, isn't what makes this cluster unique. The kicker is in the software, more specifically Clustermatic 3 featuring LinuxBIOS. Stuff happens and nodes fail, but thanks to LinuxBIOS they can be back up in a matter of seconds, not minutes.

Additional tools for the frontend node from Linux Networx makes updating nodes super-easy. You can flash each node's BIOS with a single command all in a matter of seconds. BProc allows you to run basic shell commands on any node without even installing a distribution on those nodes. w00t!

What we see here is a big shift away from expensive hardware and proprietary software. The software powering this cluster is 100% GPL, so users save a fortune in software licensing costs alone. And while these P4 nodes in particular aren't exactly cheap, they provide pretty darn good power and are far less expensive than Alpha servers. Also, using the x86 architecture means that consumer boards are not far behind in clustering. In fact, you can check out the LinuxBIOS homepage and see some pretty cheap boards that are supported already. So if you have some spare cash lying around and a couple weekends to kill, you can pick up a cheap board + cpu + memory combo and set it up as a slave node for your desktop machine with the same software these guys use to power this huge cluster.