Scaling Supercomputers With Linux, Jul 16, 2001

Cray's former chief architect for massively parallel processor systems, Steve Oberlin, is president and CEO of Unlimited Scale Inc. Working out of his home in Chippewa Falls, Wis., and employing fewer than a dozen former Cray colleagues in South St. Paul, Minn., Oberlin says his new company, formed last year, aims to build a Linux architecture for scaling supercomputers made of low-cost nodes.

Hostility toward Microsoft is easy to find in most precincts of the open source world, and not without reason. Microsoft has in recent months launched a remarkable series of public attacks on the concept, comparing it to a virus that could halt innovation, and profit, in the software business.

But nobody at Ximian seems interested in firing back. On the contrary, CEO David Patrick envisions Microsoft as a possible partner. ''We would be open to Microsoft support on the [Mono] project,'' said Patrick.

But don't take my word for it. Look at the insurance industry. A Michigan insurance company has raised hacker insurance premiums for sites running Microsoft Windows NT to up to 15 percent more than those for sites running Linux. Insurance companies don't deal in opinions - they deal in facts. Their profits depend on it

the very absence of a toll has empowered participation by a trans-national cadre of contributors who can rest assured that their work will remain available to themselves and others. This realization leads to further questions about the legal underpinnings of a toll sufficient to sustain monopoly, which Microsoft defends as the future of commerce.

The backbone of the "connected" home will clearly be a computer of some sort. This computer (or "home services gateway" as I've heard it called) won't be a desktop PC that crashes when you install new software or gets infected by a virus every time your children download a new game from the Internet.

It probably won't need much of a graphical user interface (GUI), if at all. It won't even need to be very powerful. There's no reason why the obsolete computers of tomorrow can't be transformed into stable Linux servers for the connected home.

Microsoft has been gifted with a rare opportunity to show that it's learned something from its long antitrust battle. I'm not talking about the breakup reprieve issued recently by the U.S. Court of Appeals. I'm talking about last week's news that two key players in the open-source software movement -- the Free Software Foundation and Ximian Inc. -- plan to develop Windows-compatible .Net development tools for open-source platforms including Linux.

The Duke of URL has just posted its review of EnGarde Secure Linux 1.0.1. EnGarde Secure Linux is a unique brand of Linux with a focus on security, e-commerece, and servers. The review covers installation, its interface, and more.

SBLIM (pronounced "sublime"), the Standards Based Linux Instrumentation for Manageability is an IBM Open Source project, intended to enhance the manageability of GNU/Linux systems. It does this by enabling GNU/Linux for WBEM (Web Based Enterprise Management), which is a set of standards defined by the DMTF and fostered by the WBEMsource initiative. This project is licensed under the Common Public License.

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