Alright, chaps.

A friend of mine has recently decided to buy a rack of about 16 blade servers (interlinked for load balancing) and thanks to me, he has chosen Linux for this task. We'll be doing heavy-duty work (we're downloading Wikipedia and teaching automated systems to go through it and make it semantic)

So, I need to know, whats the best Linux distro for HPCs? (or cluster computing, really)

Also, I need to find tutorials for:

installing mono/grasshopper for .NET 1.1

Installing apache

installing phpmyadmin

I'm not a server whizz here as I only deal with basic home use, ANY help will be appreciated!

Check out the Beowulf user site. I think Debian seems to be the usual choice for Beowulf clusters, but check out their site for options:

www.beowulf.org

I don't know what your applications are, but if you do parallel computing, the MPI protocol is one of the most commonly used.