Session includes briefs from leading efforts around the nation and from applications users who are leading the demand for cluster computing. The collective assessment of the panel and the participating audience is that clusters are a rapidly maturing important platform technology for high performance computing.
Clusters are an important platform, perhaps a central platform, for high performance computing.
It typically is not available from a vendor. However, because of uncertainties about budgets, few of the panelists was able to extrapolate much beyond FY01. These projects are impressive for their scale and computational capability. In addition, all of the described clusters are being deployed primarily as production computing facilities, not as research clusters. Significant Technologies and Challenges Panelists were explicitly asked to address their institutions plan to deploy clusters, and the significant technical challenges.