The idea of having a preconfigured server shipped to you is old hat: Every server vendor worth its salt lets you configure a machine online before you buy it, and you get a finished system shipped right to your data center door. Customers in the high performance computing (HPC) market, where parallel supercomputers have been hand-made for decades, have had about enough of this. They want clusters that behave like, are preconfigured like, and sold like monolithic systems. These are so-called “bright clusters,” and supercomputer maker Silicon Graphics is partnering to target this fast-growing market with its Linux-based Altix machines.
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