Companies of all sizes can now take advantage of high-performance computing (HPC), thanks to the affordable computing power of clustered standards-based Linux and Microsoft servers running commodity Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron processors. Smaller-scale do-it-yourself clustering techniques engender more possibilities, although the complexity will never disappear. For example, there are sensitive hardware and software dependencies that affect performance and reliability, as well as the slow and painstaking work that goes into parallelizing serial applications to work successfully in a clustered environment. New technologies can also help. In addition to specialized high-performance, low-latency interconnects such as Myrinet, InfiniBand, and Quadric, some use commodity Gigabit Ethernet. Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003--new to the market--can also help organizations integrate their HPC cluster into existing Microsoft environments.

Learn more about how companies are implementing HPC in-house:
- read the article at InfoWorld