Feds build Linux supercomputer

The Department of Energy's Argonne National Lab has built its largest supercomputer system ever - a 256-node cluster based on Intel hardware and the Linux operating system.

Dubbed Chiba City for the futuristic city described in William Gibson's novel Neuromancer, the cluster will be open for use by researchers at other national labs, universities and even U.S. industry.

Each node in the cluster is to be a dual processor server from VA Linux Systems, giving the cluster a total of 512 central processing units.

Chiba City is being demonstrated at Supercomputing '99, a supercomputing conference in Portland, Ore.

More details are available at www.zdnn.com.