World's largest Linux supercomputer to sniff out oil Shell
shells out on Big Blue bloodhound Petroleum company Shell will
use what it reckons will be the world's largest Linux-based
supercomputer to help ensure the West doesn't run out of
gasoline just yet. The machine is actually being put together by
IBM, which will by networking a cluster of 1024 of its xSeries
servers - a kiloserver? - all running the open source OS and
happily massively parallel. The chosen distro is Red 'Hard' Hat.
Once the beast is up and running - Big Blue will begin
installing it in January at one of the oil company's Dutch sites
- Shell will run seismic analysis applications and other tasks
of a geophysical nature as it searches for the globe's last
remaining reserves of dead tree juice. The supercomputer might
even - though somehow we doubt it - be used to work out the
effect of the petrochemical indsutry on the environment of
Nigeria, or what all that burning fossil fuel will do to the
world's atmosphere. Carbon Dioxide, we've hea