Beowulf usage statistics?

[Alan Scheinine]

Christoph Wasshuber asked for statistics concerning Beowulf clusters.
Accurate information may be hard to obtain.  I tried to look for clusters
in Italy and found only a few, about six.  For example, the Top 500
cluster list includes very small clusters (if you look near the bottom
of the list) but, of course, not everyone submits information to the
list.  There are very few entries for Italy in the Top 500 cluster and
some of the entries are out of date.  Using lists of partecipants at
Italian conferences on cluster computing, I could arrive at a number
of clusters a little larger than 6 but in any case, that order of
magnitude.  On the other hand, last month there was a conference on
Linux Cluster at Bologna and there were about one hundred people in the
audience.  One possible explanation is that many small labs are planning
to build small clusters of PCs.  If this is the case, the number of
clusters based on WWW documentation and based on talks at conference
may undercount the actual number by a factor of more than two or more.
(Analogous to saying that in terms of biomass and number of species
the dominant form of life on earth is bacteria.)
Alan