Nietubicz said other vendors "are going to have to begin to recognize that either they provide some other kind of performance to try to gain the increased price, or they are going to have to reduce the price to provide equivalent performance."

Bluffdale, Utah-based Linux Networx builds systems using Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Intel Corp. chips. In addition to the four systems sold to the MSRC, it also sold one to the Dugway Proving Ground. In total, the sale of the five systems is the company's largest supercomputing order ever. The sale was announced Monday.

Nietubicz said he was convinced that clusters can work based on the MSRC's ability to get certain computational codes used in fluid dynamics, structural mechanics and other processes to scale to multiple processors mostly by using Message Passing Interface (MPI) protocol-based code. MPI is used to create parallel applications.

The major competitor to supercomputing clusters and their distributed memory systems is symmetric multiprocessing, or SMP, a shared-memory system primarily used in RISC-based systems. Of the total $9.1 billion high-performance computing market last year, clusters accounted for about half of the sales, according to IDC.

A major limitation for moving to clusters is whether the high-performance software can scale to multiple processors. Systems that have been written in MPI can do so, but Joseph said it's difficult to accomplish for companies since many off-the-shelf software packages don't use MPI. Government labs and universities, which own their own code, can usually invest the time to convert their codes into MPI, he said.