I knew some people years ago at a company called Myrias (http://www.myrias.com) -- they are now a consulting company -- but they had some really cool stuff. Their computer was a board of 1024 68000s with a special version of Unix to support parallel processing. Had C and Fortran compilers (and an assembler called Myriasm) with constructs like pardo {} instead of do {}.
It's not hard to think about the equivalent constructs in Smalltalk (eg. pardo: , parcollect: pardetect:, etc., although the concurrency semantics could be interesting).
There's also this: http://www.beowulf.org/
But why stop with Linux boxes? What about routers? Aren't they just really fast computers optimized for sending messages? Isn't that what Smalltalk is all about? Aren't Cisco routers going for about $40 each on eBay right now? :)
Not sure why I think squeakers might be interested. I just think it is a cool concept to turn the Internet into a really big Smalltalk image. Physicists and Engineers hate Fortran anyhow :)
Cheers, Steve
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