Linux Takes Flight in Germany

Well, sort of. Tux may not be able to fly, but he’ll be helping a German aerospace firm test their engine designs with 3D modeling. By using a Linux cluster, MTU Aero Engines in Munich has saved a bundle of cash and improved their computing performance. Their cluster ranks 179 among the top 500 supercomputers in the world.

It’s an impressive rig, too. They have two parallel clusters with two different topologies — one using Ethernet and the other Myrinet — possibly running SuSE. (Early setups were on SuSE, and the article does not specify whether they continued on that path or used a home-grown solution.) One cluster has 256 3.36GHz Xeon processors and the other 192 Xeons at 2.4GHz.

How’d you like to have that kind of power on hand? Heck, run it in your basement and pipe the heat through the house in the winter.

MTU has been satisfied enough that they are committing to Linux for the long haul. They are currently testing recent kernel upgrades that will allow them to address 64GB of memory for certain applications, and they are also looking at using Linux on their desktops to replace Sun and SGI workstations. Their only concern, as with many enterprises, is replacing over 400 Microsoft applications in use in the company.