Penguin puts Linux supercomputer in sky

Hitching a ride on that ubiquitous cloud metaphor, Penguin Computing has unveiled a Linux supercomputer in the sky. Today, the San Francisco-based outfit announced the debut of what it calls Penguin on Demand - POD, for short - a service that offers remote access to high-performance computing (HPC) Linux clusters. The idea is to provide researchers, engineers, and simulation scientists with the sort of number-crunching power they can't get from something along the lines of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).