Sun Microsystems Inc., Silicon Graphics Inc. and Linux Networx Inc., among others, are offering turnkey systems intended to ease and speed up cluster deployment.

This focus on ease of setup and use arrives as IDC forecasts that spending on HPC will rise from more than US$10 billion worldwide this year to $14.3 billion by 2010, according to Addison Snell, a research director at IDC. "This has been one of the highest-growing or the highest-growing IT sector," he said.

The HPC International Conference on High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, or SC06, is technically an academic conference. But its expansive trade floor conveys a sense of high stakes for vendors trying to win larger shares of the broadening market. Vendors run large and often elaborate booths with sophisticated systems but promise easy setup as well.

Among the users at the conference was Terry McLaren, a program manager for the cyber environments group at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. McLaren said the out-of-box systems may appeal to novice HPC users or those user communities that don't have long years of experience. They may also have value from an ease-of-use perspective, he added.

But "from a cutting-edge perspective, it's unclear whether or not any in-the-box solutions will maintain speed with the innovations," said McLaren. That's where homegrown users or organizations with expertise will have an advantage.