Linux.com: The Linux Cluster Institute's 5th annual conference on Linux Clusters is underway this week in Austin, Texas. Tutorials were presented Monday at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas. The conference itself began Tuesday and runs through Thursday with presentations by researchers, developers, and vendors each day.

The cluster fest is neither a commercial event like LinuxWorld, nor a typical Linux community endeavor. For that reason it came into Austin under the radar, not drawing any attention on the local LUG mailing list. Although it's partially sponsored by Dell and IBM, there were no vendor booths set up from which to hawk their wares. There was a table with free issues of Linux Journal (another sponsor of the event), and of course there was coffee and pastries to get the morning sessions started.

But there is a sense of community here, very much like you would expect in large LUG meeting. Conversations going on outside the meeting rooms are as likely as not to include the previous -- or the next -- speaker. It's relaxed and friendly, peer to peer rather than guru to the unwashed multitude. It's also more focused on computing than any other show I've attended. Not just any computing, however. At a minimum it needs to be high-performance, and of course it's even better if it has high-availability. My guess is that a large majority of the attendees are from academia.

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