Some of the IT world's top luminaries gathered at Los Alamos
National Laboratory on 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.  Using server
'blades', Los Alamos scientists were able to build a system that
is much smaller, consumes less power and is more cost-effective
than typical supercomputers, according to Wu-chun Feng, team
leader of the Radiant (Research and Development in Advanced
Network Technology) group at Los Alamos.  "[Current
supercomputers] are not addressing some of the fundamental
issues that will be key for this coming decade