From Basement to Boardroom

When A.J. Rabassa, an 18-year-old Gaithersburg High School senior, won a T-shirt in a raffle at the Baltimore Washington Beowulf Users Group last
week, he was introduced to the crowd as “the kid with a cluster in his basement.”

“Who doesn’t have a cluster in their basement?” somebody asked.

Rabassa built his cluster — a group of computers connected to amplify their power — using spare parts, with friends. Just for fun.

But to A.J. Rabassa’s father, Albert Rabassa, and the two dozen other men and women gathered in the Tysons Corner conference room, Beowulf, a way of
building powerful supercomputers using open-source software, is not just about fun. It’s about money.