High-performance computing (HPC) for the past ten years has been dominated by thousands of Linux servers connected by a uniform networking infrastructure. The defining theme for an HPC cluster lies in the uniformity of the cluster.

Linux-based container infrastructure is an emerging cloud technology based on fast and lightweight process virtualization. It provides its users an environment as close as possible to a standard Linux distribution.

SIDUS (Single-Instance Distributing Universal System) was developed at Centre Blaise Pascal (Ecole normale supérieure de Lyon, Lyon, France), where one administrator alone is in charge of 180 stations. Emmanuel Quemener started SIDUS in February 2010, and he significantly cut his workload for administering this park of stations. SIDUS is now in use at the supercomputing centre PSM

Nowadays, high-performance server software (for example, the HTTP accelerator) in most cases runs on multicore machines. Modern hardware could provide 32, 64 or more CPU cores. In such highly concurrent environments, lock contention sometimes hurts overall system performance more than data copying, context switches and so on.

When your data and work grow, and you still want to produce results in a timely manner, you start to think big. Your one beefy server reaches its limits. You need a way to spread your work across many computers. You truly need to scale out.

When I was in college, there was a rich kid down the hall who had a computer with 16MB of RAM. Before you scoff, you need to think back to 1993.

Many of my previous articles have looked at software packages that do scientific calculations and generate scientific results. But, columns of numbers are nearly impossible to make sense of—at least, by regular human beings. So what can you do? The answer is visualization.

Are you a Python programmer who wishes your storage could do more for you? Here's an easy way to add functionality to a real distributed filesystem, in your favorite language.

System administrators at the USENIX LISA 2011 conference (LISA is a great system administration conference, by the way) in Boston in December got to hear Michael Perrone's presentation "What Is Watson?"

This video is from our good friends at USENIX's recent LISA conference in Boston. "Linux Systems Capacity Planning: Beyond RRD and top", by Rodrigo Campos

Lessfs offers a flexible solution to utilize data deduplication on affordable commodity hardware.

The votes are in! Read on to find out how your favorites fared in this year's awards.

The following article is featured in the November issue of Linux Journal (#199). Subscribe to see more articles like this and have them delivered to you every month! http://www.linuxjournal.com/subscribe

More from the SuperComputing '08 floor. Editor Shawn Powers talks about RAID, ethernet, power conservation, InfiniBand, global super computing networks, programming tools, storage and more.

More from the SuperComputing '08 floor. Editor Shawn Powers talks about Mathematica, CUDA, quiet, efficient servers and more.

Continuing at the SuperComputing '08 floor, Editor Shawn Powers talks with exhibitors about everything from spaceships to clusters to virtualization.

We're here at SuperComputing '08 in Austin, Texas catching up with a few exhibitors. If you can't be here with us, we'll bring a little of the show to you. We're searching the show floor for the coolest Linux stuff (besides Linux Journal of course) and bringing it to you.