Some quick "back of the envelope" swine flu risk calculations.

Forget hair. Sand works better!

In layman's terms, formally proven software is software written twice, once as a formal specification, and once as code, and then the two are proven to be equivalent. This is a labour-intensive way to write software, and it makes bugs much less likely, but it's not perfect: there can be corresponding errors in both the code and the specification, and there can be errors in the proof too. But nothing is perfect, and this certainly can be a good approach to write code that is as close as possible to bug-free.

Clustering far predates Beowulf or Linux; at the University of Toronto, we've been doing clustering work for years, and some of it has been successfully commercialized, e.g. LSF. The techniques are fairly straightforward, and there's no real way to keep any particular country from building a compute cluster. Of course, a cluster is not a supercomputer: as Henry Spencer once put it, you can get a lot more work out of a couple of stout oxen than a hundred chickens.