News & Print

This page is the place for you to find recent news stories regarding Linux clustering, as well as normal "print" stories -- journal and magazine article and such. We also have a list of software and project updates and releases. If you read an article, see a press release or a news story, that isn't here, please feel free to e-mail us the URL and we'll try to get it up in short order.

• A cluster from Linux Networx is being used in Iceland to investigate Iceland's weather and geothermal energy sources, by the Icelandic Energy Authory and Iceland's Instituate for Meteorological Research. The cluster will be used for 3D simulations of geothermal reservoirs and climate conditions. For more information, check out the press release from Linux Networx, which can be seen here, or a story from Computerworld, which can be found here. (March 2^nd, 2003)



• UnitedLinux has announced that they completed their certification of UnitedLinux version 1.0 with Oracle 9i Real Application Cluster software. For more information, check out the press release from UnitedLinux here. (March 2^nd, 2003)



• The openMosix project celebrates their one year anniversary today, February 10, 2003. The project has been used to build thousands of clusters all over the world. First year milestones include installation RPMs for Red Hat, SuSE, and Mandrake, node Auto Discovery, and a port to the Itanium IA-64 processor family. For more information about what they've done and where they're going on their second year, check out the press release from the openMosix folks, which can be seen here. (February 10^th, 2003)



• Aspen Systems has announced that they have now become a premiere provider of systems based on the Itanium 2 processors from Intel. For some more information, check out the press release here. (February 7^th, 2003)



• IBM has unveiled the newest version of DB2, which has support for Linux Clustering. The new implementation can scale from two to 1,000 nodes, and runs on the IBM xSeries servers. For more info, see the story here. (February 4^th, 2003)



• openMosix has released version 2.4.20-2. Included in this release is a new RPM, openmosix-kernel-source, which holds the kernel tree with the openMosix patch applied, installed in /usr/src. After many requests, this has finally been made available. Also, the openMosix folks have recently changed around the website, which we think looks really good. (we also just heard that Moshe Bar, openMosix project manager, will be speaking at the Silicon Valley Linux Users Group this coming Wednesday, February 5, 2003). (February 2^nd, 2003)



• Promicro Systems has announced that they will be moving to a new, larger facility over the course of this spring. For more info, and a link, check out the press release here. (February 2^nd, 2003)



• SGI has announced a new line of Linux supercomputing clusters, called the Altix 3000. It is based on Itanium 2 processors, and a shared-memory architecture developed by SGI. So far, many universities around the world have ordered them, including the Computing Center at Johannes Kepler University Linz, in Linz, Austria, the University of Tokyo's Earthquake Research Institute, the Queensland Parllel Supercomputer Foundation in Brisbane, Australia, The Universitat Politecnica de Valencia, in Valencia, Spain, and more. For more information, check out the press release, which can be found here. (January 24^th, 2003)



• Dell has put out a press release talking a bit about their new Linux clustering options, including blade servers running Red Hat that can fit 84 servers in a standard rack, Myrinet support in new PowerEdge clusters, and the creation of the Dell HPCC partner network, which is a program consisting of hardware and software vendors, consultants, and solutions integrators. For more info, the press release can be seen here. (January 24^th, 2003)



• Qlusters has announced the release of ClusterFrame, a new product line that offers mainframe features/capabilities (such as support for Oracle, SAP, DB2, and SAS, as well as monitoring and control functions such as SLA management), and single-system-image clustering to the IA-32 world (features include NetworkRAM, SocketMigration, and Distributed Shared Memory). For more information, check out the press release here. (January 23^rd, 2003)



• vnunet.com has a story about the world's top oil producer building a 4,000 node Intel-based Linux cluster to replace its aging IBM big iron to run its oil detection systems. The company, Saudi Aramco, currently has 900 nodes with dual PIII 1.4 GHz processors and 2 GB of memory each, running Red Hat 7.2. Expansions during 2003 will bring the cluster to its final grand total of 4,000 nodes. The story can be found here. (December 16^th, 2002)



• Linux NetworX and HP announced a partnership today that will allow each company to expand their Linux HPC offerings. HP will now offer Linux NetworX ClusterWorX software, and Linux NetworX will now be offering HP Itanium 2-based sysetms to customers wanting 64-bit processing capabilities. The press release can be found here. (December 11^th, 2002)



• The second installment of our trying to catch up with the last month and change of missed updates has been posted on the page of links we mentioned earlier. The new links are in the top section on this page. (December 8^th, 2002)



• In the first of what will be a couple of big sets of updates we do to try to catch up with everything we missed in the last month and change, we've put together a page with 19 news articles, dating back to October 21st. We'll be adding the rest of the links and press releases we have to this page shortly, and we'll let you know when we do. The page can be found here. (November 26^th, 2002)



• HP recently did some testing of Oracle's 9I Real Application Clusters (RACs) clustering software under Linux, Windows, and some other supported Unixes. HP found that the total cost of a Linux-RAC cluster in their test setup would require about a 40 or 50% discount on the part of the commercial Unix vendors to be competitive. Some other details about the test, Linux-RAC, and HP can be found at this story from The Register. (October 1^st, 2002)



• There is a story over at CNET about the "Science Appliance," the new cluster recently purchased by Los Alamos National Laboratory. It talks a little about what the cluster will be used for, and what makes this particular cluster different and cool. The story can be seen here. (September 24^th, 2002)



• With all the work they did porting LinuxBIOS to their Evolocity Cluster platform for the LANL cluster (see next story), Linux NetworX is now offering LinuxBIOS as an available option for their Evolocity line of clusters. For some more info on this, and some of the features of LinuxBIOS and LinuxBIOS Utilities, check out the press release. (September 23^rd, 2002)



• Los Alamos National Laboratory is purchasing a 10 TeraFLOP cluster from Linux NetworX. The cluster will contain 2050 2.4 GHz Pentium Xeon processors, 2.1 TB of of memory, and it will run LinuxBIOS on all nodes, which will be diskless. For more information, check out the press release from Linux NetworX here, and a brief technical overview here. (September 23^rd, 2002)



• A project called the Embedded Reasoning Institute, which is a research facility at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, CA (Sandia's main site can be seen here), has built a four node minicluster out of PC/104 modules (basically small form factor single board computers). More information about the minicluster can be seen in the miniHowTo, and there is also an article at LinuxDevices.com which can be seen here. (September 19^th, 2002)

• Here is the most current letter (Nov 11, 2002).



• Here is previous letter (Oct 29, 2002).

• The December edition of Linux Magazine's Extreme Linux column has been posted to the web. It is titled Running Commands on Many Nodes. (March 2^nd, 2003)



• The November edition of Linux Magazine's Extreme Linux column has been posted to the web. It is titled Job Scheduling with Maui. (February 2^nd, 2003)



• The October edition of Linux Magazine's Extreme Linux column has been posted on the website. It is titled Job Scheduling and Batch Systems. (January 7^th, 2003)



• There is an article on NewsForge by Robin Miller about Sun's open source Grid Engine software. It is currently running on over 7000 grids, and an increasing percentage of them run Linux. The article is titled Grid computing from Sun - Open Source and proud of it and can be found here. (December 16^th, 2002)



• Linux Magazine's August and September editions of the Extreme Linux column are up. August's edition was the 2nd part of Scalable I/O on Clusters, and September's was on something very cool, High Performance Interconnects. (December 10^th, 2002)



• The first openMosix User Group Meeting was in November, 2002. Streaming video of speeches by Andrea Arcangeli, Luigi Genoni, Matthias Rechenburg, and Moshe Bar is available in both Windows Media and Real Video formats, as well as the slide presentations of these talks and others. For more details, see this page, and to see the presentations and slides, check out this page here. Among interesting notes are Moshe's comments on the status and direction of the openMosix project, and Matt's discussion of his project, openMosixview. (December 9^th, 2002)



• There is a story at ZDNet about how Linux clusters are making supercomputing affordable, even for smaller companies like Biotech firms and other similarly sized companies. The article is titled Clustered Linux: Supercomputing on the Cheap. (November 6^th, 2002)



• The July edition of the Extreme Linux column of Linux Magazine has hit the website. This latest column is entitled "Scalable I/O on Clusters," and is Part 1 of a multi-part series. This part concentrates on PVFS, the Parallel Virtual File System. (September 30^th, 2002)



• Linux Journal has an article entitled "Using Logical Volume Management," which is about, as the title suggests, using LVM under Linux. It is not a very technical story, but talks a bit about how LVM works, as well as providing some links to the LVM HOWTO and a whitepaper from Sistina. (September 23^rd, 2002)



• There is an article over at Linux Journal about how some people a small, rural high school set up a cluster using MPICH on some dual boot systems they set up themselves in their school as a project. The article includes a little background on what they were looking to do, then a step by step of how they did it. The article is titled Using MPICH to Build a Small Private Beowulf Cluster. (September 20^th, 2002)