A group of French developers has released the first version of a Linux distribution intended to ease administration of PC clusters.
Called Clic, the software is a collaborative project of partners including software and services firms MandrakeSoft Inc. and Bull SA and a Paris research laboratory. Released free under the General Public License, the software is aimed at allowing users to connect together low-cost PCs to handle the kind of complex computational tasks usually tackled by expensive supercomputers.
This first Clic release has been tested on 20- and 40-dual AMD processor clusters at the LPM2C physics research centre in France. Support for Intel Corp.’s Itanium 2 processors is scheduled for availability in 2003, according to MandrakeSoft.
The Clic software is available at http://clic.mandrakesoft.com/index-en.html.