InfoWorld: Once the domain of monolithic, multimillion-dollar supercomputers from Cray and IBM, HPC (high-performance computing) is now firmly within reach of today's enterprise, thanks to the affordable computing power of clustered standards-based Linux and Microsoft servers running commodity Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron processors. Many early movers are in fact already capitalizing on in-house HPC, assembling and managing small-scale clusters on their own.

Yet building the hardware and software for an HPC environment remains a complex, highly specialized undertaking. As such, few organizations outside university engineering and research departments and specialized vertical markets such as oil and gas exploration, bioscience, and financial research have heeded the call. No longer borrowing time on others' massive HPC architectures, these pioneers, however, are fast proving the potential of small-scale, do-it-yourself clustering in enterprise settings. And as the case is made for few-node clusters, expect organizations beyond these niches to begin tapping the competitive edge of in-house HPC.

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