Red Hat Thursday delivered what it called the industry’s first integrated Linux-based High Performance Computing (HPC) platform, otherwise known as the Red Hat HPC Solution, an all-in-one HPC cluster stack that Red Hat and Platform Computing put together over the last year.

With all the talk about Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing, one of the missing aspects is the hardware that enables this. Yes the hardware becomes less and less important, but you still have to have something there. Netbooks are certainly part of the hardware that will enable true cloud computing, but devices like TechCrunch's CrunchPad will most likely, in the long run, be a bigger part.

As long as there are choices in computing platforms, there will be those that claim that their OS is the best over all others. In this article, I will work to put my own preferences aside, examine my years of experience with past clients who have used all three major platforms and why each made the most sense for them.

"Nick Carr posted recently about 'Google, Apple and the future of personal computing'. I agree that mainstream popular computing is shifting from desktop apps to web apps, and while Microsoft is trying to do it all itself, specialist players like Apple and Google are forming coalitions. But I disagree that the future will be found in Apple: The future is in free software..."

One of the most notable projects to make use of grid computing was SETI@home, which utilized thousands of Internet-connected computers to search for extraterrestrial intelligence (and still does).

Some People Prefer to Buy Cheap. Take most people in the market for a new computer. Put them in places like Costco or Best Buy - what do you think they will end up with? A new Ubuntu box from Dell? Nope. A Mac? Not even close. In reality, it will likely be something from HP, and it will be clearly designed for the Vista release of Windows.

...until quite recently security has not been an integral part of the core computing hardware. Hardware manufacturers have been taking steps to rectify that by introducing the idea of trusted computing based on devices such as the Trusted Platform Module (TPM).

You've picked the perfect cloud computing platform for your needs, and you have a well-designed application to run on it. The hard part is done, right? Not so fast. You still need to consider all the things you'd typically worry about if the application was for your own servers: deployment, testing, and monitoring.

IBM Research has prototyped a security solution using the infamous Trusted Platform Module that allows users to accurately validate the identity and integrity of all software running on a remote server and client machine. This approach uses a combination of software and hardware architecture defined by an industry standard body called the Trusted Computing Group (TCG).