This is a "needs no introduction" introduction, because Donald Becker is one of the people who has been most influential in making GNU/Linux a usable operating system, and is also one of the "fathers" of Beowulf and commodity supercomputing clusters in general. Usual Slashdot interview rules apply, plus a special one for this interview only: "What if we made a Beowulf cluster of these?" is not an appropriate question.

Jeff asks: "So the folks at a place called Conniption Films (great name) developed a camera called the Millisecond Camera which can shoot 12,000 frames of film a second. I read the article and thought 'Hmm that's neat' but then realized they were still using an analog process for shooting this highspeed film. Being a geek, not necessarily into the film side of things but curious nonetheless, I wonder, shouldn't a computer be able to do a better job of such a thing? They say the film runs around a spindle going 500 mph (!). Wouldn't that be prone to failure and use alot of energy? Wouldn't it be more appropriate, easier, and overall cheaper to just hook up a high res CCD to a beowulf </duck> cluster of 2 ghz+ machines and capture high speed images that way? Why hasn't it been done yet? Or has it and I haven't seen it yet?" I did a double-take, when I first read this question, and then got curious and did a little digging. Turns out, high frame rates are not exclusive to the analog photography world, and to illustrate my point, I provide this link. It's woefully short on details, and the explanations as to why a camera that can record 1M frames per second is limited to a playback of only 103 frames, but the technology is out there. Has anyone seen any other digital cameras out there with high frame-rates? What visual mischief could you aspiring photographers get into with such a camera?

crashlight writes: "The MERCURY Consortium (Molecular Education and Research Consortium in Undergraduate computational chemistRY) has organized the first national conference in undergraduate computational chemistry at Hamilton College. Speakers are giving talks on subjects such as molecular recognition, drug design, and optomizing Gaussian. There was also a session on using Beowulfs for research. Computational chemistry is a hot area right now since researchers are able to tackle previously unsolvable problems due to increases in high-performance computing power. The MERCURY group uses a 32 processor SGI and a large Beowulf cluster for research."

The Griller writes "Gordon Bell, one of the creators of VAX, and Linus Torvalds were at the launch of a new supercomputing platform at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Based on Crusoe processors from Transmeta and running a version of linux, it is aimed at being cheaper than conventional supercomputers by requiring no cooling and lower maintenance. " Basically, it's blade clustering, using Beowulf.

KeithOSC writes "Looks like Apple may have one more step closer to real parallel computing. Myricom has just released its drivers for their high-speed cluster computing interconnect. I've been beta testing for two months now. With my findings, Mac OS X may be a real Beowulf cluster option. (Now, if Apple would just give us faster memory and PCI buses.)"

cascadefx asks: "I work for a mid-sized mid-western university. One of our departments has started up a small Beowulf cluster research project that he hopes to grow over time. At the moment, the thing is incredibly weak... but it is running on old hardware and is basically used for dog and pony shows to get more funding and hopefully donations of higher-end systems. It runs Linux and works, it is just not anything to write home about. Here's the problem: my understanding is that an MS rep asked what it would take to get them to switch to a Microsoft cluster. Is this possible? Are there MS clusters that do what Beowulf clusters are capable of? I thought MS clusters were for load balancing, not computation... which is the hoped-for goal of this project. Can the Slashdot crowd offer some advice? If there are MS clusters, comparisons of the capabilities would be welcome." One has to only go as far as Microsoft's site to see its current attempt at clustering, but what is the real story. Have any of you had a chance to pit a Linux Beowulf cluster against one from Microsoft? How did they compare?

HiredMan writes: "Wired is running an article comparing the set-up and admin of Linux Beowulf clusters versus Mac based clusters. Slant of the article is that the Macs are easier to set-up, maintain and are more flexible. They note that the Linux "how to" manual is 230 pages while the corresponding Apple document is a 1 page PDF file. Dauger Research of former Appleseed fame is mentioned as well, of course. MacSlash is also covering the article. Let the on-topic (for once) Beowulf comments fly..."

WrinkledShirt contributed this review of a Professional Linux Programming, a tome he says can "bend light" by its sheer size -- 1155 pages of multi-author, multi-language instruction and examples. Read on for his thoughts on the book's shortcomings as well as its strengths, and remember, lift with your knees, not with your back.

Danny Yee writes with the perfect background reading (once you've finished the Tolkein books, of course) before checking out the new LoTR movie: "For something completely different, reviews of The Complete Sagas of Icelanders and Seamus Heaney's Beowulf. Essential background reading for serious Tolkien fanatics! You might also want to check out my other medieval literature reviews."

An AC wrote: Forget Beowulf ^? clusters, Jacques Gelinas has made available a kernel patch to enable many virtual servers running on the same machine, even the same kernel. Read his original message posted to the Linux kernel list." Imagine what this will mean for hosting companies...

forgotten password writes: "I'd just started working on my morning M&Ms, when I was asked where my group can buy a good turn-key ~2CPUx10-node Beowulf cluster in two hours. I suspect the time frame is longer than that, although the window-of-opportunity for the money is apparently on the order of days, and a quote before the procurement meeting would help. Any ideas? Who's good? What it should cost? Thanks!" If you're quick, maybe you can become the world's newest manufacturer of custom beowulf clusters.

Gambit Thirty-Two writes "Old news, but Sendmail has ported their MTA to Linux390." And in other news: sitz writes "It would appear as though some madman has port apache to WinCE <Insert witty beowulf comment here>. It's only been tested on a couple of platforms (including the Jornada 720, and is 'based on the WinNT port, with lots of dirty modifications'. That's still pretty swanky. I've also set up a mirror of this site, which will be up for a couple of weeks." Update: 08/27 15:19 PM GMT by H : Yes, the Sendmail story is a dupe - somebody didn't read my story before posting his. *grin*

rkischuk writes: "InformationWeek has an article about a group of ex-Cray engineers working on a new architecture for clustering Linux systems. 'It's not easy trying to build scalable systems from commodity hardware designed for assembling desktop computers and small servers.' Per the article, 'As the number of CPUs in a Beowulf-style cluster-a group of PCs linked via Ethernet-increases and memory is distributed instead of shared, the efficiency of each processor drops as more are added,' but 'Unlimited's solution involves tailoring Linux running on each node in a cluster, rather than treating all the nodes as peers.'" Looks like Cray engineers think about clustering even when they're not at Cray.

kryzx writes: "Here's one to tickle your imagination: using genetic programming to come up with new, patentable solutions to problems. Could be happening very soon. Here's an article at MIT Technology Review. This work, being done at Stanford and Genetic Programming Inc. by John Koza and company has already succeeded at reproducing quite a few ideas for existing patents, ranging from old to very recent. It's apparently much easier to compare against existing patents than sift through hundreds of surviving algorithms to determine if they are useful, original, and patentable.) Also, this company is a good target for your tech envy, with their 1,000-node Beowulf-style cluster of Pentium II 350's and 70-node cluster of 533 MHz DEC Alpha's. (There are pix, too. PII cluster on the main page, Alphas here.) Wanna play with the toys? They have job openings for programmers. :-)"

Hell O'World writes: "Scientific American has a story on the history of Beowulf Clusters. It's written by the guys who built the Stone SouperComputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory." Nice example of how old hardware can be put to use to make new breakthroughs. Nothing radically new, but hey, it's 4AM Saturday morning, what do you expect. :)

SEWilco writes "Sandia National Laboratories has released its "Cplant" massively parallel processing software. This is related to the software used in their ASCI Red supercomputer, and eliminates several scalability problems to allow hundreds of nodes for algorithms which can't be parallelized for Beowulf-type clusters. This is now number 2 on the TOP500 supercomputer list. The press release refers to "licensing terms", but the license is the GPL. We discussed this in a Linux clusters discussion and several earlier reports as ASCI Red grew."

Slashbacked below are a handful of updates, corrections and followups, on topics ranging from Tito in space to who really developed the next-generation OS/2. Please enjoy.

Daniel Rall writes: "Project JXTA, originally a research project spearheaded by Bill Joy and Mike Clary, is now an open source effort, with a vision to enable developers to create innovative services and applications. It addresses the need for an open, generalized protocol that interoperates with any peer on the network including PCs, servers and other connected devices." Seems to be a combination of Gnutella and Beowulf clustering - lots of potential.

Slashing back tonight are bits and pieces on optical transistors; a genuine linux toaster; words from Nintendo's president on the real status of the Gamecube; and another potentially nice push in the world of digital archives. Please enjoy.

However skeptical the ads make you, it's hard to deny that what used to be considered supercomputing power keeps showing up in consumer-priced boxes, and the threshold of what really is extreme has crept steadily upward. If you're planning a project of more than average size, though, the review that chromatic contributed below of Planning Extreme Programming could be a valuable read, and the ideas in the book itself could save you a lot of money and time. Even if you have no plans to desire to install a beowulf in your broomcloset, it's interesting to consider what sort of thought must go into any large-scale programming project.