Over the last year, the Open Build Service (OBS) reference server, a service to build and distribute packages from sources in an automatic, consistent and reproducible way, has been flooded with new packages, new distributions and even entire new architectures, deluging its build servers with compilation jobs. But spring is coming: SUSE has has just sponsored a rack server with some serious compute power for us to speed up your compilations. 

In case you missed it, in October of last year, Adapteva wrapped up a successful Kickstarter campaign to build a Raspberry Pi-inspired $99 Linux supercomputer. The campaign was successful in raising $898,921 for the first versoin of the Parallella computer, a supercomputer equipped with a dual-core ARM A9 processor and a 16- or 64-core Adapteva floating-point accelerator. Quite a few people have questioned this idea, but it's actually quite interesting and could usher in the era of grassroots supercomputing. Adapteva's CEO Andreas Olofsson has recently been shedding more light on the project. 

With all the momentum that the OpenStack cloud computing platform has, it was inevitable that eventually hardware running it and optimized for it would appear. What is notable, though, is that one of the first OpenStack-based hardware entries comes from Nebula, the company that evolved from the NASA Nebula cloud with Chris Kemp, who was CIO of NASA. 

Apache is still by far the most widely deployed HTTP server, according to the latest Netcraft web server survey, but nginx has been slowly, steadily gaining market share, thanks to its blazing speed. If you want to try a faster web server and move from Apache to nginx, you'll probably have to change some of your websites' configurations, starting with rewrite directives.