What is the future of MPI and Beowulf computers?
For the next several years, the MPI standard and Beowulf clusters will continue to dominate supercomputing. More specialized systems such as that offered by Orion and by IBM will find their own number of users. Whether or not their price per performance will match Beowulf systems is a matter of conjecture. The big advantage of these moderately specialized systems seems to be their lower power consumption per CPU. In any event, all these systems run MPI.
