Linux clustering start-up Terascala is generating interest among investors, as the Massachusetts-based company recently received a $3 million in first-round venture capital funding.

Terascala is building high-density Linux-based server processing and storage blades with three goals in mind: very high density in a single rack (150Tbytes or 400 computing processors in a 19-inch rack); lower power consumption (with the use of dual-core AMD Opteron CPUs); and simplified management — both in terms of physical hardware and system configuration.

Terascala does this with two kinds of blades. Compute blades consist of four separate Linux servers (each running on either single- or dual-core Opterons) which can be booted as individual machines over a network, or configured as part of a cluster. Storage blades consist of eight 500Gbyte or 700Gbyte disks configured in a RAID array, which can be easily plugged into, and pulled from the Terascala enclosure.

All this sounded good enough to Ascent Venture Partners, which provided the $3 million first-round cash to Terascala. Industry analysts are also bullish on the market Terascala is targeting; IDC estimates the worldwide clustered supercomputing market will grow from $9.2 billion in 2005 to $14 billion by 2010.

The leadership team at Terascala comes from Network Engines, a maker of enterprise network appliances for Web and security applications. Terascala CEO Larry Genovesi was the former chief executive at Network Engines, while COO Bill Elliot was vice president of marketing at Network Engines. Genovesi and Elliot also founded Ammasso together — an Ethernet adapter company which integrates remote direct memory access (RDMA) technology into its clustering products.

Incidentally, the company is looking for a few good Linux hackers. “Senior Linux Software Engineer” is one of the open positions on the company’s Web site.