Headlines

NCSA - Access Briefs
Ceremony Dedicates Linux Supercluster

April 20, 1999

The National Computational Science Alliance (Alliance) introduced its first 128-processor workstation supercluster running the Linux operating system at an April 8 dedication at the Supercluster Computing Facility of the Albuquerque High Performance Computing Center (AHPCC), located on the University of New Mexico (UNM) campus.

The supercluster, called Roadrunner, is a 64-node AltaClusterTM by Alta Technology Corporation containing 128 Intel 450 MHz Pentium II processors. The supercluster runs the Linux operating system and the processors are interconnected via a Myrinet network for high-speed communications. Roadrunner will provide the scientific community with a shared, cost-effective production environment for solving computational tasks too large for individual workstations. Roadrunner is designed to support traditional high-performance computing applications and emerging national information infrastructure applications, such as scalable Web serving, interactive visualization and data exploration, information serving, and data mining.

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San Jose Mercury
Plugged In: Linux Showing Up In Supercomputers

April 19, 1999

BY THERESE POLETTI

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Linux -- the renegade operating system that is among the hottest topics in Silicon Valley -- is also making its way into the most serious bastion of computing, the supercomputing world.

Linux, developed by Finnish programmer Linus Torvalds in 1991, is given away over the Internet and managed by a far-flung group of programmers, part of what is known as the open source movement. Linux has been catching on among some corporations and Internet service providers as a reliable system to run Web servers or e-mail servers.

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