Beowulf in a Box

[Greg Lindahl]

> My feeling is that the main reason that previous specialist hardware system
> never really took off is that the programming environment was typically too
> complex and idiosyncratic, and keeping up with microprocessor development
> was too difficult.

The box you describe also will also have a difficult programming
environment -- it's a "clump", a cluster of multiprocessors, which can
be much more challenging than a simple cluster. Hopefully the vendor
will be able to continue to keep up with microprocessor development,
but other boards were based on similar processors which suffered from
technology failures, such as the transputer.

-- g