Multipart question: 
1.  About development environments in Linux:  I know nothing about
Linux. I'm wondering if there is a development environment like Visual
Studio.NET for Linux and if so, what flavor of Linux should I be using
with it?

2.  I'd like to talk to a consultant about rewriting a process I'm
doing on a single processor machine and moving it to a cluster of
Linux machines.  Any general help would be great.  I'm just at a loss
as to where to look for help.

galois-ga
  .
1)
I would first look at the IBM page about linux tools
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/
http://www.devx.com/ibm/Door/6836

For reference on specific questions consult the "HOWTOS"
http://www.tldp.org/

You will find both commercial 
http://www.codework.com/kylix/
and open software  IDE tools, such as
Magic C++ is a fully integrated development environment(IDE) designed
to meet the requirements of programmers developing on remote
Linux/Unix servers using ..
http://www.download2you.com/details_page.asp?titleID=6624

and chances are you will use the world's most popular open source database
http://www.mysql.com/
which is also is available under open or supported licence.

Ans PLEASE do not miss looking at packages, like
 LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) HOWTO: Installing MySQL and ...
LAMP howto: install MySQL and a PHP-enabled Apache webserver on Linux -
http://www.lamphowto.com/lamp.htm
 which integrate several popular opens softeare applications.

2) For consulting you should look at contract programming sites 
 http://www.ivarch.com/services/contract.shtml
 http://www.spartechsoftware.com/contracting/
 and exchanges, such as 
  http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/18/2022226&tid=156&tid=4    
  http://www.elance.com/

 Here, at GA, the posting of email addresses is specifically discouraged
 if not prohibited for both researchers and commenters. So this a forum for
 public one-shot questions, not for finding a consulting relationship.
 (You probably want someone who is not used to  bending agreements)
so, try
SEARCH TERM: freelance programming consulting Linux  
which brings number of sites:
://www.google.com/linux?hl=en&lr=lang_en&safe=off&q=freelance+programming+consulting+Linux&btnG=Search


Hedgie

Hii!!

Of course you have a lot of software development environment for linux.
It depends on the language you want to program, for example, to
program in java, you have eclipe, netbeans, etc...

If you tell me the language, i can give a better answer!!


About the program to a cluster, i'm finishing my master degree in
computer science, so i can give you some help. You don't have to pay
anything, just in the end, you can donate something via pay pal if you
want!! ;)

Well, right now I'm using C#, VB.NET, and SQL.  Also I'm using SQL
Server 2005 express (beta 2).  Visual Studio has C++, C#, J#, VB.NET.

The Linux world is a bit confusing to me right now.  

Maybe this will also help:  I wrote a search engine to help me find
profitable trading strategies in commodities markets.  The problem is
that it takes about 100 hours to get a result on 20 days worth of tick
data for only one product.  So...you see the problem.  Lots of number
crunching and my method is not very scalable.  So that's where I'm
coming from.

Thanks for your comment.

About the devel environment, you use mostly microsoft languages, so
it's quite dificult to get an devel env. However read this articles, i
guess that will be helpfull for you!!

http://www.devchannel.org/devtoolschannel/04/04/16/1755236.shtml

To get an devel env to build sql queries, no problem... just search in google!!

You have a lot of free Database Management Systems to linux too... just search.

I guess that xaamp is a good choice for you, it brings mySql!!
http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html

Search in www.sourceforge.net for projects about DB and devel env to
linux!! But definitely it will be easier to get an env to devel other
language like java, C/c++,....

About your search engine, i guess that yout problem may be is your
algorithm and not scale. Which language are you using?? Which DataBase
Management System??

;)

I forgot to ask... What is the size of your database?

The size of the database is dynamic.  To give you an idea, it's about
100,000 rows for each day of data.  Each row has 7 numeric entries.  I
study a months worth of data at a time - about 25 days or so.   But my
search program creates a lot of new tables (100,000) with 1,000's of
entries each.  I then dump those tables because I just need to create
a value from them.  I use SQL Server 2005.  It's written in tSQL and
the interface is written in VB.NET but it doesn't do much by way of
calculation.  All time consuming calculations are done in SQL.  It's
basically just a giant combinatorics problem.  The method is clever
the mathematics is simple.

btw, Thanks a lot for those web sites.  

Suppose I just want to write in C++.  What Linux dev environment would
you suggest?  There seem to be so many tools.  With Micosoft OS I just
get Visual Studio and I'm done shopping.

For free, there is eclipse:
www.eclipse.org
It is designed for java, but supports many languages, including C++

For purchase, there are several, but perhaps the best is visual slickedit
www.slickedit.com

You will need to have the gcc and gdb packages installed to support
integrated compilation and debugging.

For a free database, try mysql
www.mysql.com

for source code management, the standard tool is CVS, which is free.

For the old-school or hardcore, you just use vi or emacs and write some make files.