God Bless Linux!!!!
Are one of those who still do not trust linux in mission critical systems? if yes then read this before saying anything.
Its about the deployment of Linux on a super computer,a cluster of 280 833MHz Compaq Alpha workstations!!!!,It's going to be used in a weather forcasting system,it can forcast the weather of next 4-6 days in less than 6 hours!!!
since last year clustering has attracted the experts attentions after hardware companies like Intel and AMD couldn't provide the processing power needed for new software technologies with their CPUs, one of the old and I can say most efficient linux based clustering system is Mosix,It integrates with linux kernel to gain the highest performance in process accounting in a cluster,its easy to use and once you set it up the expansion is a piece of cake.
Do you know how weather forcasting systems work? I know one way to do so,It can be a good project for a Master's or PhD student in Iran to develop such system,or it can be done as a commercial R&D project in "Edare Havashenasi". First of all the weather records(like wind speed,humidity,temperture,...) including sattelite images should be collected covering a period of at least 5 years in a specific region, After that an image processing module will change the sattelite images to computer readable data (like cloudy regions,...) it's kind of OCR actually, after that all these data with the actual state of the weather in next day(s) will be feeded to some Neural Networks,these networks will be trained (like human brain) regarding those data and finally they'll be ready to be used in forcasting system. The actual research part of this project is the design of Neural Network classifiers and evaluators and also the image processing unit ,in which ,the more accurate it works,the more reliable the predictions and training will be,I'm very interested in this project if you want to start it I'd be glad to join you so drop me a message if you keen.