Build Date: Tue Feb 17 19:50:05 2026 UTC
If someone like Karl Rove had wanted to neutralize the most creative, intelligent, and passionate members of his opposition, he'd have a hard time coming up with a better tool than Burning Man. Exile them to the wilderness, give them a culture in which alpha status requires months of focus and resource-consumptive preparation, provide them with metric tons of psychotropic confusicants, and then... ignore them. It's a pretty safe bet that they won't be out registering voters, or doing anything that might actually threaten electoral change, when they have an art car to build.
-- John Perry Barlow
Beowulf Underground Subverts Decent Way of Life
1999-05-15 14:11:27
The Beowulf Underground is an evil subversive group bent on destroying everything we hold dear and sacred as computerists. Instead of nice, compartmentalized machines that send terse and appropriate messages over thin wires, they want to have big MONGOLIAN CLUSTERFUCK computers with Aqualube and Free Love and Open Source and gooey money shots of data splurting EVERYWHERE. To them I say, Beaujolais!
Beowulf is the coolest thing to come down the pike in a long time. Hell, in terms of changing the world, I think it might even be more important than Linux. Beowulf is a clustering technology, meaning you can tie together a whole bunch of computers and they will look like one computer, with the combined strength of all the components.
In other words, you and I can take out of our closets all those lame dusty old computers with the long gray beards and bad coughs and the rheumatiz and put them all together into a brand new sexy SUPERMODEL computer with Stairmaster thighs and stunning white teeth. Wee-haw!
Clustering of computers is real cool. But Beowulf is OPEN SOURCE clustering, making it super-extra fancy cool. Unfortunately, Beowulf has come out of the academic environment, making any documentation about it REAL BORING. That's where the Beowulf Underground comes in. It's a cool new Web site that has lots of news and info about Beowulf. I must say, it is Da Bomb.
In fact, we're going to build a giant UBERCLUSTER with, like, 2

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