HPC is at a major crossroads. Cluster capabilities are at unprecedented levels and new technologies and applications have led to new challenges. As the former mainstays of the Linux community have become increasingly commercially focussed, it has become vital that academia, government and industry are able to address their HPC strategy with access to the best information.

The keynote speaker from the ROCKS project will give a US perspective on the future of open source. The panel of experts will demonstrate what can be achieved with open-source and proprietary software for cluster

management.

Speakers from AMD, Intel and the PowerPC team will talk about the relative advantages of each chipset regardless of which manufacturer you chose.

Myricom and many other vendors will discuss openly the relative merits of the technology and how to evaluate it. Applications do not always scale uniformly and testing out a 32 node cluster does not mean the solution will work well at 128 processors and beyond.

A number of applications vendors will discuss the platforms, operating systems and networks they will support. With so much choice, not all combinations can be supported. Who will be the winners and how can you ensure your application will run on your platform?

More information is available at http://www.streamline-computing.com/news_2.shtml .