Creating modern digital visual effects in movies is not an easy process. The job falls on clusters of computers called "render farms." Terra Soft, developer of the Yellow Dog Linux distro, says its new offering, Y-Film, is designed to significantly streamline the task, bringing a more efficient process to large studios and putting glossy effects within easier reach of smaller ones.

"Microsoft Windows is emerging as an acceptable operating system for high-performance computing (HPC) clusters in place of Linux, lowering the bar for entry into that space, according to some analysts and major vendors."

Linux HPC clusters now dominate the market. We often hear about the “big ones”, but many small individual or group clusters still exist. I believe, the rapid and disruptive growth was due to the low barriers to entry. You could play with “it” before you committed big resources to a larger system. A simple and effective “try before you buy” proposition.

If you’re like a lot of IT organizations, you’ve got servers from Hewlett-Packard, routers from Cisco, operating systems from Red Hat and Microsoft – and you may even have Solaris from Sun somewhere.

There are many download servers and mirror server, for ubuntu packages and updates, in this world. A default server will be set for your software sources according to your location. This server need not be the best and fastest server available for you.

You can choose the best server available and set it as the download server for your software source in Ubuntu.

3Leaf says its new V-8000 Virtual I/O Server v. 2 is the first input/output virtualization tool to run on off-the-shelf, commodity x86 servers. V-8000 is designed with an enhanced backbone I/O fabric of up to 40 GB per second, giving servers a wide road for heavy I/O operations.

Following our article looking at the state of X.Org (along with announcing the release of X Server 1.4.1), we proceeded to share the contributors behind the X Server -- both the individual developers and companies involved with fostering the growth of this important free software package since 1999.

Jeremy Allison on free software, Samba clusters and world domination...

Each day, the drumbeat for Ubuntu Server Edition is getting slightly louder. In recent weeks, a growing list of ISVs (independent software vendors) has vowed to support Canonical's Linux server operating system