Phillip brown writes "Found yet another story on the Avalon beowulf system making top 500 supercomputers list," while ML wrote to us saying "CNN shows the Avalon Supercomputer in pretty purple light, gives credit to Linux, and throws in a nice dig at Microsoft. " Mmmm...I love to start my morning with good publicity.

Michael Eilers has written a sort of introduction to Beowulf, what it does, what it doesn't do, and why we should care. It really is a sort of quickie distributed computing FAQ that many of you might enjoy. So hit the link below and find out.

At the worldwide Cray User Group (CUG) meeting this week, Cray Research, Inc., announced a new vector supercomputer series, the SV1 series. This is truly a nerd's computer. It is an SMP rather than NUMA machine, and each processor can do 4GFlop/s. The chips themselves are cool, too. You can take a processor and divide it up into four processing units. Some definitley innovative stuff here. The computers start at US$500,000 and will be available in August.

Trepidity writes "NEC claims to have created the world's fastest supercomputer, the SX-5. At its maximum configuration, it can reach speeds of up to four teraflops, and can be equipped with a main memory of four terabytes. If I win the lottery I'll buy one. "

Yesterday Red Hat Software announced the $29.95 parallel supercomputer. This CD-ROM is the result of the a collaboration between NASA, Red Hat and a number of research centers. Extreme Linux (some of you will know it as "The Beowulf Project") is all the software you need (with source code, of course) to cluster several computers and create your own giant parallel processing unit. For more information on this, zap to the press release.

Shane McLaughlin writes in with this link and says "19.2 GigaFlops, distributed supercomputer? The ultimate linux dream machine, 40 nodes with a rated performance of 19.2GFlops. NT peaks out at 4 processors, Wolfpack, eat yer heart out. Just new, so not much tech info up yet Take a look at their 1996 effort, x86s for $27,000 for 1.2 Gigaflops at this link"

Digital and Kryotech have released a 767MHz Alpha they call the Personal Supercomputer. 4MB of L3 cache and it runs at -40C! Starting at over US$20,000 for the NT-based model, they're not cheap, but I bet they fly, especially in terms of FPU!

Raymond Fellers writes "A few months ago, Intel released the Math Kernel Library which provide level 1,2,&3 BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines) and FFTs tuned for Pentium Pros and IIs. Unfortunately, the MKL was only available for Windows. Recently, a group of Intel employees working on the ASCI Red supercomputer released a Linux version of the MKL. " You can read more here.

Zooko wrote in with this story where you can read about how universities are deciding to use Beowulf clusters instead of supercomputers. The Beowulf standard parts in parallel to provide faster, cheaper computing without all the crazy engineering that goes into a high end supercomputer.

NEC will be rolling out a new supercomputer, one of the few of the shrinking market, within the next few days. It's quite interesting to read some of the press releases about these supercomputers. NEC will be rolling out a new terraflops machine for use in climate and natural disaster modeling. Recently, the US Department of Energy announced that they will be buying more supercomputers as well-to model atomic bombs. Ironic, isn't it?

The U.S Department of Energy will launch a project called "Pathforward" this month. The project aims to build a 30 terraflop supercomputer by the year 2001. The U.S DOE will buy 2 IBM PowerPC-based supercomputers with 4096 processors in late '98 or early '99 and will buy a second 3 terraflop based computer from Cray Research Inc. later that year.

Hewlett-Packard is the main contractor in charge of designing externalconnect links so that the computers may be clustered efficiently (more than 6.4GB/sec, minimal latency)