IBM, currently number three in clusters behind HP and Dell, is determined to be number one by the end of 2008, according to Wendy McGee, program director of its Cluster Solutions Brand & Business Unit.

Bearing down on its mark, IBM has been growing at 29%.

Getting there involves hybrid widgetry like its next-generation "6B" Linux-based System Cluster 1350.

Timed to coincide with Supercomputing, it adds a Cell blade, ClearSpeed's newfangled floating-point co-processor accelerator and QLogic's equally newfangled HTX Infiniband Adapter.

The system can scale to 1,024 nodes using any of bunch of rack-mounted or blade-style Power, AMD and Intel server nodes.

Two ClearSpeed Advance boards in a single dual-socket Xeon-based server equipped with two 3GHz dual-core Xeon 5160s delivered 102.6 GFLOPS on the Linpack benchmark while adding very little heat.