Linux: for all things great and small

By Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 18 November 2008 05:24

Opinion and Analysis

Most of us get a chance to see Linux in action at the desktop or single server level. Some of us use Linux on mobiles and other little gizmos without even realising that the penguin is doing the lifting.


And most of us do not even know that Linux is capable of much bigger things, of playing in the super heavyweight category.

A visit to any high performance computing centre opens one's eyes to the versatility of the operating system and the extent to which it is used to crunch data for scientific and other work.

The Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing is located close to the heart of Melbourne. It was established by the Victorian universities, with funding from the Victorian state government and the Australian federal government as a state high performance computing centre.

Says chief executive Bill Appleby: "It was basically intended to support scientific research at universities. It is run on a subscription model with the universities each paying an amount that is proportional to their research output. It has grown from one or two people to about 60 or 70 people. Some of our funding comes from academic work, a lot of it comes from industry collaboration and research projects. We do a lot of contracted work in high performance computing in engineering and health informatics and other areas."

David Bannon, the founding systems administrator and current operations manager, says in 2000 VPAC had a large UNIX cluster running HP-UX. But that soon changed.

"It was an Alpha server and we had money in the bank that we were going to use to top that up," says Bannon. "In 2002, I went around and spoke to all our users and potential users and told them we were going to make the machine even bigger. And they said that was great but what they really preferred was a Linux cluster."