I was in a similar situation setting up a research group. Wanted an expandable setup for a research group, that would meet approval of local IT sysadmins (some remote management opts, vendor support). Per 2.6K pounds a pop I got a Dell poweredge T410 server with 2 6-core CPUs and 24GB RAM. I'm never one to push a Dell (been purchasing IBM/HP for years) but this is a decent machine for a decent price. I tried various cloud solutions using virtual machines on Amazon and similar frameworks, but for the kind of work we do (frequent software updates, massive amounts of data that need to be stored locally and can't be transferred easily), those don't scale. We use Condor as a job submission engine. Not that we don't like SGE but with Oracle's plans (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Grid_Engine) one can never tell. PS: remind you friend to invest in a QNAP NAS or similar for backups / disaster recovery.

I think the fault is of the original reporter at the Register who either did not understand what is said (text comprehension) or decided to use a bit of journalistic 'slight of hand' to pazzazz his rather dull story. In any case it's clear the article contains no content supporting its title. And slashdot? I've been reading it on/off for 14 years and there's clearly an exponential decay (with us being just at the beginning of the drop; who know where this site will be in 10 years).

Dear Geoffrey, While I appreciate idealism as the other bloke, your argument leads to a rapid slippery slope. Following it would have lost the brits and americans espionage battles of the cold war. What you are saying is that by choosing a side and operating in a manner that helps that side -- in this case, the opposition forces in Iran, you are playing into the hands of the Iranian regime who will use it to argue that the rebellion is supported by Non-Iranians. You are basically saying that any opinion against the Iranian regime from an outsider source will serve to strengthen the Iranian regime. This is rather defeatist in my own ideological opinion which argues that people, of all nations, have the duty of taking a stand against oppression, and not allow cynical regimes to manipulate public opinion into thinking that doing so will weaken the opposition.

Planely speaking, "el al" literally means "towards upwards". "El" means "to" and "Al" means "on" or "over". Combinatorial semantics apply here. As a person speaking Hebrew for more than 30y now, I think your friends got it wrong.

The OSS bit becomes a big deal when you want to use parallel computations (on cloud, grid-computing env). We use R for thousands of massively parallel computations on TeraGrid, using its database interface to querty remoted DBs.

And a mailing list + archives r-sig-hpc@r-project.org

Let me second that. I work in NeuroImaging at Uchicago, and since we were given cluster and TeraGrid access we got neuroimaging folks using R and SWIFT (Grid parallel workflow language), and High Energy Physics folks implementing their signal analysis methods on neuroimaging data. They used to say that physical distance (in yards) is a good prediction of collaboration potential in academic departments. These days, sharing a computer cluster seems to achieve a similar thing. But, if you are asking how you can contribute, try setting up your system to load virtual machines on each node -- If you can get that going you'll find many potential users that couldn't bother with adapting their code to the cluster, but would be glad to load an image and run a job in it.