searchEnterpriseLinux: Donald Becker, an MIT grad who in the 1990s pioneered high-performance computing (HPC) with commodity components, returned to his alma mater recently to update the Boston Linux & Unix User Group (BLU) on the state of HPC and his work to make Linux clusters more powerful, more user-friendly and easier to manage.

Now Becker is the CTO of Scyld Software and its parent company, Penguin Computing Inc.. In 1994, he helped launch NASA's Beowulf Project which demonstrated that $50,000 of commodity hardware, clustered together, could equal the performance of a $1 million Cray supercomputer. For his work, he received the Gordon Bell Prize from the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.) Computer Society in 1997.

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