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Last year I built a cluster using OSCAR http://oscar.openclustergroup.org/
I haven't tried any others, but OSCAR installs pretty easy. Just run the installer on the head node, and when it is done it feeds an image to each of the other computers that are a part of the cluster. It includes the ganglia monitoring tools and the apache server so you can view it.

Red Hat does not offer a competing product, so what is the problem? There are many "cluster distributions" out there, but neither Red Hat, Suse, or any other major vendor have a well integrated cluster version of Linux. There are things like Rocks, Oscar, Warewulf, and companies like Scalable Informatics, or Basement Supercomputing are there if you need help.

and what about the site licence needed for this baby, huh? For us mere basement-cluster builders, there is a cheaper, open source alternative: The OSCAR Project ( Open Source Cluster Application Resources). Yes, it runs on Linux, but it is a nearly step-by-step system of setting up HPC-level clusters. It is being used on many 100+ CPU High Performance Clusters around the world, and it is free without those pesky site licences.

In addition/supplement to what the other poster mentioned, there's Oscar: http://oscar.openclustergroup.org/ and there's the C3 stuff: http://www.csm.ornl.gov/torc/C3/index.html. There's also ROX, which we're not using (not because it's bad, but because we used something else, and I can't find a URL now anyway).

We're using parts of those first two systems here, combined with some in-house stuff (which we're planning to release when it reaches an acceptable maturity level).

It is very easy to setup a Linux HPC cluster. There are several projects out there for example:

http://www.rocksclusters.org/ (Rocks guys do a great job of simplifying the process. I highly recommend this one if you are new to Linux Clusters)

http://warewulf.lbl.gov/pmwiki/ - Warewulf cluster toolkit. Not as easy to use as Rocks but some very cool features and very flexible for different kinds of Linux Clusters.

http://oscar.openclustergroup.org/ - Oscar Toolkit is popular as well. I can't comment on it much since I haven't tried it.

But their links could at least have mentioned OSCAR http://oscar.openclustergroup.org/ or my personal favorite, ROCKS http://www.rocksclusters.org/, as these are more prevalent than xCat systems.

Personally, I like Rocks, as I ran three parallel architectures (i386/AMD64/IA64), on the same based distribution, just with each tuned to their particular processor. Comes with SGE and Myrinet support out of the box, and there are Rolls, i.e. custom software assemblages, for OpenPBS, for those who prefer it, as well as PVFS. It's easy to set up, and easy to administer, as the nodes are presumed to be interchangeable and disposable. When you reboot a node, it's obliterated and a fresh OS and supplementary package repository are laid down on a clean disk. No questions about version skew.

They now have a custom roll to help you build a visualization wall, but I never had a chance to try that one. (try convincing your boss that you want 4 digital projectors and a big room to play with)

The downside to the above distributions are that they presume batch-queue environments, which is appropriate for most of my work, but less so for many people trying to simulate owning an SMP, without paying SMP prices.

Other people assure me that the current version of OSCAR is solid as well, but they seem to lag in the multiple architecture support area (Itanium is always behind), and don't current support AMD64 natively. On the other hand, they build on top of several RedHatish linuces, as opposed to Rocks where you get Centos (RHEL), period.

a neat project any hardware hacker could appreciate

Dell supports at least one open source projects I used to work on, oscar

They did a pretty good job of supplying free test equipment and thier labs provided a lot of internal testing time. So either the original article is incorrect or the person quoted in the article is not familiar with Dell's involvement in Open Source projects.

So lets not totally bash them yet (in fact, I liked the people I dealt with there a great deal and can not speak too highly of them).

I built a trial cluster of 5 PIIs back in 2001 using the 1.0 release of OSCAR from the Open Cluster Group. Their documentation (and software) was pretty good back then. I followed up the trial with a for-real-use 20-node cluster of Athlons (since expanded to 32 nodes) using OSCAR 1.1, which is still going strong. I haven't looked at the latest OSCAR packages but they're now at 2.2.1 and the docs may be better yet.