By Matthew Dublin

Two recently-released Linux distributions are definitely worth noting. For all you Sony Playstation3 (PS3) cluster people out there, Fixstar has announced the release of Y-HPC v2.1, an updated version of their Y-HPC cross-architecture cluster construction suite. Y-HPC is available to anyone who purchases Yellow Dog Enterprise Linux (YDEL), a big support package built upon the Yellow Dog Linux operating system for the Cell Broadband Engine multi-core processor based systems, like the PS3. You can click here for a description of how Y-HPC's node imaging features work — the going price is $285 per node on existing PS3 clusters. The Linux family of operating systems, which in addition to Yellow Dog includes Fedora, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, is the only operating system to be ported to the PS3 thus far. For those of you unfamiliar with the world of PS3 clusters, this page hosted by the North Carolina State University, where the first academic computing cluster of PS3s was built, will break it all down for you.

We're not quite sure what Fixstar or other PS3 software vendors will make of this, but Sony announced this week that the new $299 PS3 Slim does not come equipped with the "Install Other OS" option, which normally would facilitate users in turning the gaming consoles into data crunching computers.

Here's a little video of the new PS3 Slim:

The other release worth checking out is the updated version of Open Discovery, a USB turnkey bioinformatics Linux distribution with a customized MPI specifically designed for multi-core processors. Open Discovery 2 ships with an MPI compiled GROMACS V-3 3, the molecular dynamics software application. You can download Open Discovery 2 here.