Supercomputer Boots 1 Million VMs

Computer scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy have simultaneously booted one million Linux kernels, all of which ran as virtual machines on the Thunderbird supercomputer at Sandia National Laboratories. Thunderbird is a 4,480-node Dell-based computer cluster, with each node running 250 Linux kernels. The Sandia researchers say they will use the network of virtual machines to study the capacilities of large botnets of compromised computers. See Government Computer News for the full story.