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Mandrakesoft upgrades Linux for supercomputing

Stephen Shankland Former Principal Writer
Stephen Shankland worked at CNET from 1998 to 2024 and wrote about processors, digital photography, AI, quantum computing, computer science, materials science, supercomputers, drones, browsers, 3D printing, USB, and new computing technology in general. He has a soft spot in his heart for standards groups and I/O interfaces. His first big scoop was about radioactive cat poop.
Expertise Processors, semiconductors, web browsers, quantum computing, supercomputers, AI, 3D printing, drones, computer science, physics, programming, materials science, USB, UWB, Android, digital photography, science. Credentials
  • Shankland covered the tech industry for more than 25 years and was a science writer for five years before that. He has deep expertise in microprocessors, digital photography, computer hardware and software, internet standards, web technology, and more.
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Stephen Shankland

Mandrakesoft, a French Linux seller that's seen hard times competing with better-known brands such as Red Hat, has updated a product for high-performance technical computing.

A new version of the company's Mandrakelinux Clustering product includes support for the InfiniBand high-speed networking technology used to link numerous lower-end machines into a single computational engine, the company said Wednesday.

One software user is Hewlett-Packard, whose 240-processor HPC1 computing cluster can be used by customers in the manufacturing, bioinformatics, and oil and gas industries. That system employs an InfiniBand switch from Voltaire.

Mandrake isn't the only one interested in the market. Novell is planning a lower-priced version of its Suse Linux for clustering, and Microsoft hopes to make a foray into the Linux-dominated area as well.