America's Lawrence Livermore nuclear bomb lab has teamed up with open-source computing heavyweights to build the next generation of Linux superclusters, ultimately scaling into the petaflop range. The project has been dubbed "Hyperion".

"Hyperion represents a new way of doing business. Collectively we are building a system none of us could have built individually," said Mark Seager, project leader at the atom lab.

"The project will advance the state-of-the-art in a cost-effective manner, benefiting both end users, such as the national security labs, and the computing industry, which can expand the market with proven, easy to deploy large-and small-scale Linux clusters."

The Penguin-badged hypercomputing push will see the national lab teamed with Dell, Intel, Supermicro, QLogic, Cisco, Mellanox, DDN, Sun, LSI, and RedHat. The team will work together to assemble a massive testbed system which will be used to develop technologies capable of scaling into the petaflop (quadrillion floating-point operations per second) realm, only just reached by the world's largest supercomputers.

More Here