Philip, a new supercomputer-- named after one of the first Boyd Professors (A Boyd Professorship is the highest and most prestigious academic rank LSU can confer on a professor) at LSU -- chemistry professor Philip W. West, is a 3.5 TFlops Peak Performance 37 compute node cluster running the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 operating system. Each node contains two latest Quad Core Nehalem Xeon 64-bit processors operating at a core frequency of 2.93 GHz. Philip was delivered to LSU in May, 2009 and is to be open for general use to LSU users.
I was doing some work and thought, "Wouldn't it be nice to have my own cluster?" I'm guessing not many people have those types of revelations, and probably fewer that decide they should go ahead and solve the problem. I wanted a cheap, small, easy to pack, light, quiet, low-power cluster that I could sit on my desk, and not even think about it.
Linux magazine HPC Editor Douglas Eadline had a chance recently to discuss the current state of HPC clusters with Beowulf pioneer Don Becker, Founder and Chief Technical Officer, Scyld Software (now Part of Penguin Computing). For those that may have come to the HPC party late, Don was a co-founder of the original Beowulf project, which is the cornerstone for commodity-based high-performance cluster computing. Don’s work in parallel and distributed computing began in 1983 at MIT’s Real Time Systems group. He is known throughout the international community of operating system developers for his contributions to networking software and as the driving force behind beowulf.org.