November 2007 -- Issue #163

The November issue of Linux Journal is all about High-Performance Computing from many angles. Delve right into this month's hands-on feature articles, including Khurram Shiraz's primer on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Cluster Suite, Daniel Bartholomew's piece on gracefully transferring services between systems with Heartbeat and Jack Chongjie Xue's case study on building a high-availability e-mail system at a major university.

Another theme this month is doing your core work faster and more efficiently. Take Jes Hall's article on distributing your compiling work across multiple machines in your network via distcc or Girish Venkatachalam's on enhancing your performance when network programming in C. We also interview execs at RapidMind about their cutting-edge platform for leveraging multicore processors and accelerators.

Next, check out our trusty gang columnists and opinionators: Nick Petreley is talking Java, Reuven Lerner is thinking APIs and Jon "maddog" Hall is parsing Sun's Solaris marketing hype.

Finally, Chef Marcel Gagne knows the real reason you bought dual-core processor--to play high-performance racing games! Touché, Marcel!

Features

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Cluster Suite by Khurram Shiraz
  The trusty Red Hat cluster.
• Getting Started with Heartbeat by Daniel Bartholomew
  Availability in a heartbeat.
• Building a Scalable High-Availability E-Mail System with Active Directory and More by Jack Chongjie Xue
  Cyrus-IMAP to the rescue.
• Distributed Computing with distcc by Jes Hall
  Put your lazy machines to work.

Indepth

• Picking the RapidMind by Nicholas Petreley
  How to get those cores pumping.
• High-Performance Networking Programming in C by Girish Venkatachalam
  Make the most of your bandwidth.
• Multiple Associations with Stream Control Transmission Protocol by Jan Newmarch
  Chat up SCTP.
• Roman's Law and Fast Processing with Multiple CPU Cores by Roman Shaposhnik
  Life in the -fast lane.
• High-Performance Linux Clusters by David Morton
  Linux in the Top 500.
• Open-Source Compositing in Blender by Dan Sawyer
  Power compositing in Blender.

Toolbox

• Reuven M. Lerner's At the Forge
  Thinking about APIs
• Marcel Gagné's Cooking with Linux
  Because Nothing Says High Performance Like a Good Race
• Dave Taylor's Work the Shell
  Keeping Score in Yahtzee
• Jon "maddog" Hall's Beachhead
  Navigating by the Sun
• Doc Searls' Linux for Suits
  The Usefulness Paradigm
• Nicholas Petreley's /var/opinion
  Is Hardware Catching Up to Java?

In Every Issue

• Letters
• UPFRONT
• Tech Tips
• New Products

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