NASA's new SGI Altix system is expected to be installed in August at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at the Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif. The new system will be the first supercomputer to operate 2,048 processor cores and 4TB of memory under a single copy of Linux(R) -- creating the largest Linux single system image (SSI) in the world.

There are more than a few of us who would be overjoyed to see Open Source take over the world. For the geeks at NASA, though, the world is not enough. Open Source is nothing new for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration — Linux Journal looked at Linux use in NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratories way back in May 2000.

"Linux was selected for a NASA experiment aimed at proving the feasibility of COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) hardware and software for scientific space missions."

The U.S. government has hired IBM to build a supercomputer [Sequoia] with more power than all the supercomputers on the Top500 supercomputer list combined. Sequoia will use approximately 1.6 million processing cores, all IBM Power chips, running Linux, which dominates high-performance computing at this scale.

Sun Microsystems has began the deployment of South Africa’s largest supercomputer, a 27Teraflop system that runs a suite of open source software. The system is the second phase of a multi-million rand project that was awarded to Sun last year and will be housed at the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) in Cape Town.

Yet another reason for Nasa to use exclusively Free Software...

"PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA has successfully tested the first deep space communications network modeled on the Internet.

On March 29 & 30, NASA will host its first Open Source Summit at Ames Research Center in Mountain View California.

What do the BlueGene/L System, the BlueGene/P system and the New Mexico Computing Applications Center SGI system, based on the Altix ICE Integrated Compute Environment 8200 model, have in common? First, they're the top three fastest computers in the world, according to the latest Top 500 supercomputer list. Second, they all run Linux.