Linux Magazine has an article by Christopher Smart, Tuesday, December 29th, 2009

The next twelve months will be good to Linux and Free software, but we won’t capture the market just yet.

Azure is a cloud computing service à la Microsoft. Microsoft Azure provides developers with on-demand computing power and storage. To develop an azure-enable cloud application, you can use Visual Studio. After installing all required software you can start developing your application. Visual Studio allows you then to add projects of the type "cloud service". As an example, you can add a so called webrole which is basically like a normal .net website and acts as the presentation tier.

A simple view on one HPC test comparing AMD and Intel's new hardware.

http://www.advancedclustering.com/company-blog/high-performance-linpack-...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/25/act_super_duke_out/

High Performance Linpack on Xeon 5500 v. Opteron 2400
Written by Shane Corder - Cluster Engineer
Tuesday, 16 June 2009 16:23

Bjarne Stroustrup invented C++ while working at Bell Labs (before they got broken up by over zealous managers.

I found the link from Slashdot and links to »

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IEEE Spectrum: The African Hacker By G. Pascal Zachary

With home-brewed code and a little help from Microsoft, a programmer in Ghana launches Africa's first software empire

The first time I meet Hermann Chinery-Hesse, he is pouring diesel fuel from a plastic jug into an electric generator. I am in the West African country of Ghana, visiting his software company, Soft Tribe Ltd.

Chinery-Hesse is chief of the Tribe. He's made a small fortune writing software, working as a systems architect, and selling computer code to hundreds of businesses in his country of 21 million people. He drives a Mercedes. He wears imported Birkenstock sandals. He hails from a prominent family, was born in Dublin, and went to college in the United States. He could be working anywhere on the strength of his Irish passport, yet he's spent the past dozen years in Accra, Ghana's coastal capital and one-time slave-trade hub.

This steamy December morning, with deadlines looming, his electricity is out, his programmers are idle, and he's feeding fuel to a balky 50-kilovolt-ampere generator—one of the three he keeps at the ready.

Having emptied his container and thus delivered power to his 18 programmers—about one-tenth of all full-time code writers in Ghana—Chinery-Hesse relaxes and, for the first time, acknowledges my presence. Stroking his beard, he quips, "If we Africans are to develop, we must want to get our hands dirty."

Wrapup of the South African National Compute Grid Meeting in Cape Town, 25/07 - 01/08.

Here is a wrapup of the training, deployment and strategy meeting we recently held in Cape Town. It was held hot on the heels of a short grid school in Johannesburg which I also attended. The organisers of the OSG school at Wits were very kind to have given us a lot of time to present the plans we are implementing and there was a lot of very constructive discussion.

LINPACK is a collection of Fortran subroutines that analyze and solve linear equations and linear least-squares problems. LINPACK was designed for supercomputers in use in the 1970s and early 1980s. LINPACK has been largely superceded by LAPACK, which has been designed to run efficiently on shared-memory, vector supercomputers. See the Wikipedia.

Here are extensive FAQ.

J2EE provides various ways of using clusters. The clustering is built into the application servers.
For example:
* Weblogic provides load balancing and fail-over by making use of replica aware stubs that work only with their proprietary T3 (java clients) protocol.

* Borland Enterprise Server provides load balancing and fail-over by making use of Smart Agents.

There are numerous Linux activities in South Africa. See for example CTJUG

[This is just a stub - it needs to be extended.]

In 2006, Microsoft announced the release of Windows Compute Cluster Server (CCS) 2003, marking the company's first attempt at an operating system for HPC applications. Industry observers say that Windows CCS has been well accepted, particularly for small computing clusters.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_Builder