image of supercluser with supercomputer and earth

Supercluster

I believe concepts having to do with Superclusters are exciting. The goal of this website is to inform and educate people about the meanings of Superclusters. I hope some people find this page, which is in its infancy, to be as interesting as I do. And please contact me a line if you have any interesting comments - contactsupercluster at gmail.com.

Supercluster in the headlines... UK Trade and Investment - Government Launches Life Science Super Cluster

There are currently three meanings for Superclusters that I know of:

1. Astronomy- Superclusters are thousands of galaxies connected in a structure by their mass.

2. Academia - Academic or private groups that act both independent and as part of a larger collective who collaboration toward a common goal.

3. Computer Technology - Mainframe Supercomputing

There is also a crepe called a Supercluster in a Milwaukee Wisconsin mobile kitchen.

Astronomy

There are intriguing attempts at mapping our universe. The Atlas of the Universe site is excellent example.

Also check out David Darling's site for more information about Supercluster's and the structure of the universe.

Make your own high quality prints at the Hubble Gallery page at the Hubblesite.

Our search for neighbors with the SETI institute and the SETI at home project.

Academia, Industry & Government

UK Supercluster for healthcare innovation launched.

The word Supercluster is also used by various academic institutions and generally refer to alliances of cross disciplinary research groups collaborating toward the goal of helping the people and the earth, here are a few... Colorado State Clean Energy Supercluster, UC Davis Humanities Institute, The SSRN Social Science Research Network and their Indiana Technology Innovation Super Cluster for creating jobs in the Mid-West and The Massachusetts Technology Collaborative/John Adams Innovation Institute -Massachusett's Life Sciences -Supercluster report to the Boston Foundation.

Other academic institutions use superclusters for their Supercomputing programs and workshops, for example, Maverick at Mississippi State, Umea University HPC2N, the High Performance Computer Center North at Umea Sweden, the Tsukuba Advanced Computing Center - Part of the Japan's AIST - National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology.

Also check out the Apple G5 Dual Supercluster at Virginia Tech.

Compute for science with BOINC -Berkeley Open Infrustructure for Network Computing, and the VCSC -Virtual Campus Supercomputing Center.

Mainframe Computer Technology

Supercomputers are used by the Government, the Military, Academia and Industry for anything from modeling of environmental, astronomical and physics applications to space shuttle systems or data storage, health and medicine.

Supercluster in the news, a recent Computerworld article .

In the world of Supercomputing, "the word Supercluster comes from clustering which relates to Supercomputers being woven together through racks of smaller servers through thousands of high speed links"-(cnet article). This can be done with any platform but today many references point to Linux Open Source.

In the private sector there is a European company called Revenge that sells product called Supercluster. Cray the Supercomputer giant has trademarked, "Cray SuperCluster".

At the heart of today's cluster technolgy is Linux open source and a good resource of information is the clusterbuilder.org site. There is a basic clustering encyclopedia for terms and other information.

The U.S. Army is into the Supercluster business using the Apple/COLSA team in order to more efficiently model hypersonic flight. In a 2005 MacDailyNews article, "The Hypersonic Missle Team (HMT), now has access to one of the world's largest and most powerful computers: a supercluster of 1,566 64-bit, dual processor Apple Xserve G5 servers".

NASA's COLUMBIA SUPERCOMPUTER - among other interesting doucuments, the Columbia site has and article about how the Columbia Supercluster was built.

Maui High Performance Computing Center - The JAWS SYSTEM provides computing to various communities.

With Apple's improved OS X Snow Leopard, and native 64 bit multiprocessor architecture computer processing will be growing even more powerful.

Northrop Grumman created a massive supercluster with a $150 million dollar budget and a staff of 550 people and more than 6,000 CPUS! This huge amount of processing power can be used for modeling, simulation and analysis excercises, or processing image or environmental data from satellite arrays. See the Computer World article.

The TOP500.org website is dedicated to traking the world's most powerful computers. They publish a top 10 list. Today's most powerful computer is the Roadrunner Supercluster which is at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

Pleiades (below) is named after the open Star Cluster in the constellation of Taurus. The Supercomputer is housed at the Ames Research Center, Moffett Field California.

photo credits: NASA NAS, Las Alamos National Laboratory.

Please note this site is under construction so please check back soon for more information and references.

email: contact at supercluster.com @ gmail.com