ComputerWorld: For many users, building high-performance computing systems has been largely a do-it-yourself operation. But now HPC vendors are paying more attention to delivering out-of-the-box clusters in an effort to encourage wider adoption, especially among new users.

Longtime HPC users said at the SC06 conference here last week that turnkey systems have always been available but that the increasing use of blade servers and other systems that can be easily integrated by vendors is facilitating the out-of-the-box trend.

Sun Microsystems Inc., Silicon Graphics Inc. and Linux Networx Inc. are among the vendors offering turnkey systems. SGI last week said it will ship an integrated system with four quad-core Xeon processors in a single chassis in next year’s first quarter. Linux Networx introduced a series of ready-to-run HPC systems tuned for applications such as computational fluid dynamics and crash and impact analysis.

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