Something wonderful this way comes [bootable cluster CD]

Clusters dedicated exclusively for educational purposes are rare, yet most educational institutions have an abundance of PC and Macintosh laboratories. The suggestive name bootable cluster CD (BCCD) offers hope. Indeed, at the BCCD's core is a bootable image that runs completely off dedicated media, which lets us use the BCCD to convert, within minutes, practically any room of Intel- or PowerPC-based workstations into a potent parallel computing environment. What we have here is a comprehensive framework for high-performance computing education, and that, my friends, is the opposite of a failure to communicate. This article elaborates on what lies under the BCCD hood, some uses of the BCCD, and future directions