Bell, Torvalds usher next wave of supercomputing

Bell, Torvalds usher next wave of supercomputing

Some of the IT world's top luminaries gathered here at Los Alamos National Laboratory Friday to witness the unveiling of a compact supercomputer that proponents say could provide the model for high-performance computing systems in the years ahead.

Gordon Bell, one of the original brains behind the minicomputer, and Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux operating system, joined a collection of scientists for the unveiling of the supercomputer, a Beowolf cluster called Green Destiny that was built from hundreds of so-called blade servers -- compact servers stripped down to their most basic components.