Grid Tools: Coming to a Cluster Near You
Alex Wolfe · Queue · 2004
A set of surprisingly mainstream software tools has come out of an unlikely source—a scientifically focused collective called the Gelato Federation. Formally launched in March 2002, the group seeks to apply open source Linux software running on Intel’s advanced Itanium processor as an enabling technology toward the goal of putting together large, highly scalable clusters of 64-bit systems. The Gelato group believes such scalability is the most significant trend in high-performance computing in the last 10 to 15 years. It marks a potent—and much cheaper—alternative to the Cray supercomputers that populated university labs in the 1980s and early 1990s.