Admittedly, my experience is a few years out of date, but it used to be that the immediate answer to this question was Scyld, the direct descendant of the original "Beowulf" cluster created at Goddard Space Flight Center by Donald Becker. We used it for 3d rendering and video processing and it was really slick, and being based on RHEL it was easy to get people who knew how to work on it/software updates/support in forums, etc.

I've only seen one comment in support of Scyld here, has it fallen out of favor for some reason?

And, because it's in Java in a browser, it's running choppy on my 4 core i7 with 12gb of ram. Kudos, you've made a pdp game bloated and unplayable.

I'm really thinking that this article is leaving some very important details out... It's really strange that a money-making data center would have physical space as it's primary limiting factor. Things like power, cooling, network, etc are usually far more important than square feet of tile, especially when anyone with an experience in data centers isn't going to put it in a high-value real estate market, it's going to be out in some industrial/commercial zone in the burbs where land/power/water are cheaper. It's not like the developers sending programs/renders to the cluster need to be anywhere near it physically.

I'm guessing these folks are addressing some sort of unique problem that they have to solve this way, and they don't bother to explain that to us in the article.

What are you talking about? Many corporations now use internal webmail systems, and web front ends to things like Outlook, ticketing systems, inventory, etc, plus web-based document storage.

Hell, I bet your bank runs a web front end to the tellers and managers.

Just because something is web based doesn't mean it's sitting outside of your control.

Dude. I tried to mod you funny and I fat-fingered you to overrated. So I'm replying to hopefully un-mod you. My apologies.