The Argonne CP6 project is an ongoing experiment on the possibilities of using a commodity operating system and commodity hardware for building massively parallel clusters of machines. The Unix community is already very familiar with building these types of systems. A good example of clustering technology is the IBM SP. These types of machines have already shown that its possible, and in fact necessary to combine many processors in some form to achieve very high computational speedups. There are also tools like PVM and MPI that are widely available for developing massively parallel applications on clusters of workstations.
The Math and Computer Science Department of Argonne National Laboratory would like to offer thanks to Microsoft Corporation for their generous donation of software for this project.