Some of the IT world's top luminaries gathered here at Los Alamos National Laboratory Friday to witness the unveiling of a compact supercomputer that proponents say could provide the model for high-performance computing systems in the years ahead.

Gordon Bell, one of the original brains behind the minicomputer, and Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux operating system, joined a collection of scientists for the unveiling of the supercomputer, a Beowolf cluster called Green Destiny that was built from hundreds of so-called blade servers -- compact servers stripped down to their most basic components.