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MandrakeClustering Shows Off At ISC2003
joestar writes "Just released today at ISC2003, Germany, is "MandrakeClustering", a high-performance computing Linux distribution/solution, which sounds interesting, at least in the PR: Pentium support with optimizations made with the Intel compiler, 64-bit Opteron support (with in this case, up to 16 GB of RAM for each cluster's node!), parallelized URPMI (Mandrake's apt-get) and other dedicated tools. This product is based on a one-year research project "CLIC" involving MandrakeSoft and partners. A good snapshot of the product running a 3D real-time demo is available here. The interesting point now: MandrakeClustering's goal is to provide a system which is easy to deploy, easy to administer and use. Well... Mum would certainly love to play Quake with this toy."
Unless I read the article wrong, these clusters will not be operating on the same level as Windows and OSX. This is designed for research and heavy-duty number crunching, something that XP and OSX aren't. I agree, talented programmers are spending too much time on worthless projects, but this isn't one of them.
It looks like I'm the Apple troll today, so I have to point out that there is a specially designed Xserve U1 rackmount for clustering apps. I think that part of this has to do with the fact that Apple is still used disproportionately often in academia, and part of it has to do with the Apple-Pixar connection. But it turns out that OS X (the server edition, anyway) is a clustering OS. See here for more details.