

Dear HN, what are some applications of supercomputers/massive clusters? - rabbit9

Are they just built as a cool way to show off? I know some are used for scientific simulations, but I've never heard any details (I'd love to hear them if you have) and I don't know how many applications would need that power. Are there commercial applications? Industrial ones? Are there any cool open source projects build around supercomputing/cluster computing? Do tell!
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lacker
Supercomputers and clusters are pretty different. For commercial applications,
it's much more common to form clusters out of many commodity parts. Any large
and complicated web site probably has clusters backing it up. Things like web
search, mapping websites, anything hosting a large amount of data like Youtube
or Flickr. In fact basically anything that comes from Yahoo, Amazon, Google,
etc probably runs on a cluster.

Open source cluster software seems a lot less common than other open source
stuff... the problem is, it takes a lot of work to keep a cluster running, and
that work ends up being very specific to the details of cluster setup. It's
too bad there aren't clusters available in general for people to play with,
although with things like the Amazon services you can get close.

