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While high-performance clusters often provide the most cost-effective way to speed up your calculations, building your first cluster can be a frustrating experience. But it doesn't have to be. Here are ten tips to help you get started.

The Energy Department has contracted SGI to develop an open-source version of its high-performance computer-testing software, according to Steve Reinhardt, principal engineer for the Mountain View, Calif., company.

Security, Web services and Linux jobs continue to dominate the IT help wanted ads and are projected to remain among the hottest skill and certification areas in 2005, according to research firms that specialize in tracking skills and certifications.

Expect Additional SugarCRM Product Offerings With Low TCO and Core Business Management Functionality in 2005

Follow these steps and have your users logging on at their Linux/Unix desktops with their Windows accounts.

"There are some people who are passionate about the differences between 'free software' and 'open source'," wrote Kevin Bedell earlier this year. But he was beginning to wonder if the difference matters, he added. "I think it's time to stop dividing the community using labels. We don't need different names for the same thing." Read the rest of his essay here, in the start of our end-of-year "Best of 2004" round-up of articles from LinuxWorld Magazine.

Without question, open source is one of the most important forces in enterprise IT. Apache is still the reigning champion of Web server software. Red Hat and MySQL are two of the most-watched software vendors today. And the success of Linux is such that even Microsoft, once considered the unstoppable juggernaut of the OS market, is being forced to play defense.

OpenAdvantage, which has received funding from a regional government body, says its remit is to bring together people who provide something in the open source area with people who have software needs

The Linux Box is preparing to create an original internet radio show, which will air biweekly and provide the FOSS community with an audio format to help raise awareness of the many pertinent issues we are facing.

"IE has vulnerabilities that cannot be ignored, but with these vulnerabilities come fixes," notes Jupiter Research senior analyst Joe Wilcox. "If you fix the browser enough, it becomes more secure. So whether one is more vulnerable or not we will only see over time."

A great gift was left under the Christmas tree for the Linux community this past weekend. Referred to by its creator Linus Torvalds as "Woozy Numbat," the present is otherwise known as the 2.6.10 Linux Kernel release.

Welcome to this year's 51st issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Piotr Roszatycki reported that he has created preliminary packages for PHP5 already. We would like to thank all contributors and translators of this online resource who have helped provide high quality information to our readers. We are seeking more contributions in order to be able to maintain DWN in 2005 as well.

The open source Derby database engine provides developers with a powerful new tool for lightweight database development. Derby databases are file system based and portable across different types of systems. Because of this, a common strategy is to create databases at development time and ship them with the binary distribution as opposed to having it created on the fly.

Astaro's unified threat management package provides complete protection for the corporate environment

Monta Vista and other companies like Timesys have gone a different route by improving the real-time performance of the Linux kernel. This is done by tracking down the various routines that limit interrupt response time and recoding them more efficiently from an interrupt standpoint.

These are files for a coming release from Service Integrity, a company based in Newton, Massachusetts, selling software that helps businesses mine their data for customer leads. Each file highlighted in a bright color represents a match with known "open-source" code covered by a license. And each match represents a potential problem that Service Integrity must resolve. . Henry calls up a pair of windows crammed with identical lines of code. He quickly picks out an open-source file that is using borrowed code that can be traced to a popular Web site devoted to macabre puzzles.

Philadelphia-area small business clients money and make their computers more reliable by installing Linux and other open source programs.

An interesting dicussion on the lkml examined the efficiency of the inode cache in the 2.4 Linux kernel, discussing several tunables primarily helpful to systems serving large NFS or Samba mounts. In particular, a slowdown was reported on such a system easily reproducible by doing a find / while cat'ing large files to /dev/null. In a discussion between 2.4 maintainer Marcelo Tosatti, 2.6 maintainer Andrew Morton and VM maintainer Andrea Arcangeli, it was decided that this was likely due to too small of an inode cache hash table resulting in a large number of collisions. For the work case in question, some tunables looked to prove helpful. Going forward, effort might be made in 2.6 or beyond to improve the inode cache.

Starting a software company used to be hard work. Some smart people had a vision for a new product, obtained financing and spent months or years developing new software. But that's all changed now. All the smart people at Octane Security in Shakopee had to do was download some free Linux network security software from the Internet, tweak the code a bit and start selling it earlier this month for $2,200 to about $10,000, depending on the size of the network being protected.

The government on Tuesday said it continues to evaluate options for using open source software, a move which would proliferate the usage of IT by bringing down its costs.