The University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) has contracted with Cray to provide the supercomputer for the National Science Foundation's Blue Waters project. That computer will tap AMD's new 16-core processor.

Blue Waters will be composed of more than 235 Cray XE6 cabinets based on the AMD's Opteron 6200 Series processor (formerly code-named "Interlagos") and more than 30 cabinets of a future version of the recently announced Cray XK6 supercomputer with Nvidia Tesla graphics processing units (GPUs), Cray said. All of this will be combined into a single, powerful hybrid supercomputer.

The … Read more

The Kindle Fire outsold the other three new Kindles combined despite the higher price for the Fire, according to a market research firm.

Kindle Fire sales hit an estimated 95,000 units in the first day of sales, according to eDataSource, a marketing research firm that tracks orders via e-mail confirmations of orders placed. The projected numbers are based solely on orders placed with Amazon's Web site, according to Carter Nicholas, CEO of eDataSource, which released the report on Friday. eDataSource tracks 800,000 inboxes, according to Nicholas.

The Kindle Fire launched last week at $199 and was made available for preorder immediately on the Amazon Web site. Shipments will start in November.

Along with the Fire, Amazon announced three other new Kindles, with prices of $79 for the new Kindle, $99 for the new Kindle Touch, and $149 for the Kindle Touch 3G. But those models combined still did not outsell the Fire, according to eDataSource, which estimates that sales of the other new Kindle units totaled approximately 25,000 units during the same period.

Alas, the Fire and the other Kindles can't hold a candle to sales of the original iPad. Apple reported that 300,000 were sold on the first date of sales in April 2010. … Read more

In a conference call Thursday, HP Chairman Ray Lane and newly appointed CEO Meg Whitman reaffirmed HP's commitment to hardware .

Ray Lane--who is now executive chairman, a more active position than his previous role as nonexecutive chairman--began the conference call by stating that "as an active member of HP's board of directors for the past 8 months, Meg has a solid understanding of our products and our markets...as an executive chairman I will partner with Meg and support her as she leads the management team to improve execution and enhance accountability."

Whitman began by addressing … Read more

Hewlett-Packard said today that it is spinning off its PC unit as it tries to escape the financial throes of the increasingly low-margin PC business.

On top of confirming it is in talks to acquire Autonomy and essentially shuttering its WebOS operations, HP said its board of directors has authorized the exploration of strategic alternatives for its PC business, the Personal Systems Group (PSG).

"HP will consider a broad range of options that may include, among others, a full or partial separation of PSG from HP through a spin-off or other transaction," the company said. HP expects that … Read more

Tilera, a relatively young chip company, said today it has raised an additional $45 million in financing from tech heavyweights such as Samsung and Cisco Systems.

The San Jose, Calif.-based company, which designs many-core processors, received a new round of financing led by Artis Capital Management that includes new investment from WestSummit Capital Management, Comerica Bank, Cisco Systems, and Samsung Venture Investment. Existing investors include Walden International, Bessemer Venture Partners, Columbia Capital Broadcom, NTT Finance, VentureTech Alliance, and Quanta Computer.

The previous round of financing, announced back in March 2010, raised $25 million.

Founded in 2004, Tilera has made … Read more

The director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications has seen the future of supercomputing and it can be summed up in three letters: GPU.

Thom Dunning, who directs the NCSA and the Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies at the famed supercomputing facilities on the campus of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says high-performance computing will begin to move toward graphics processing units or GPUs. Not coincidentally, this is exactly what China has done to achieve the world's fastest speeds with its "Tianhe-1A" supercomputer. That computer combines about 7,000 Nvidia GPUs with 14,000 Intel CPUs: the only hybrid CPU-GPU system in the world of that scale.

"What we're really seeing in the efforts in China as well as the ones we have in the U.S. is that GPUs are what the future will look like," said Dunning in a phone interview Thursday. "What we're seeing is the beginning of something that's going to be happening all over the world."

NCSA already has a small CPU-GPU hybrid system. "It's something we have been working on for a number of years. We have a CPU-GPU cluster for the NCSA academic community. Made up of Intel CPUs and Nvidia GPUs. A 50 teraflop machine," he said. (Note that Oak Ridge National Laboratories is also installing a hybrid system now.)

But it's not going to be a snap to tap into the processing potential of GPUs. "Programming these machines to do [GPU] calculations is still a very substantial effort. There will be some applications that will be rewritten to use GPUs [but] a lot of times it will be only part of an application that will use it so you won't get nearly the power and computing advantage of running it all on the GPU," he said.

The catalyst to move programmers en masse toward GPUs will be when chips appear that combine both high-performance CPU and high-level GPU functions on the same piece of silicon, Dunning said. "If they start to solve some of these other problems like… Read more

A longtime Silicon Valley company says it can turn Apple's iPad into an X terminal, allowing it to run Linux, do true multitasking, and even run Flash-based apps.

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based StarNet Communications announced this week that it can transform the iPad into a an X terminal--generically referred to as a dumb terminal because the data processing is done on the server not the client--for Linux, Unix, mainframe, and supercomputers.

(See "Update" below for notes about the iPad's keyboard and initial browsing impressions.)

iLIVEx, available from the Apple App Store for $14.99, allows iPad users to connect to Unix and Linux desktops and applications hosted on remote Unix and Linux servers. StarNet makes bold speed claims too. "iLIVEx features an ultrathin data transfer protocol allowing for LAN-like performance, even over 3G connections," the company said.

And iLIVEx maintains a stable connection to the iPad, StarNet said. "Connections...run over securely encrypted SSH (Secure Shell) tunnels. Built-in session persistency allows users to reconnect to their remote desktops should the iPad get disconnected, turned off, or the user temporarily switches to another iPad app."

iLIVEx can also be used by non-Linux users, allowing them to run a remote desktop. When purchased, StarNet provides a free Linux desktop account on a StarNet-hosted Linux server. On their remote desktop users get "a number of capabilities not currently available on iPads,"… Read more

Oracle has sued Micron Technology, alleging the chipmaker overcharged Sun Microsystems for memory chips, according to a report.

Micron and other manufacturers of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) "artificially inflated" the price of chips, according to an Oracle complaint filed Friday in federal court in San Jose, Calif., Bloomberg reported.

The Oracle suit is based on DRAM sales made to Sun. Oracle acquired Sun in January.

While other companies, such as Hynix Semiconductor and Samsung Electronics, are cited as "co-conspirators," they're not named as defendants.

The origin of the case goes back to a 2002 … Read more

Renee J. James, senior vice president and general manager of the Software and Services Group at Intel, discussed Intel plans to buy security company McAfee for $7.68 billion in an interview with CNET on Thursday.

James is responsible for delivering software products and support across for Intel's product lines. In addition, she is responsible for the Intel worldwide developer programs as well as R&D for next-generation software. James is also chairman of two Intel subsidiaries: Wind River Systems and Havok, both of which report into the Software and Services Group.

Q: What do you see as McAfee's strengths? Renee J. James: McAfee's No. 1 strength is that they have a fantastic R&D team, engineering, as well as research at the core of security: database threat management. They've augmented that with some very key acquisitions over the last two or three years. On a forward-looking basis, their core technology is very well positioned for mobile, for cloud-based security, for where I think security is heading. They're not a market segment leader in AV (antivirus). It's an important business and continues to be an important business but they have other assets that are equally important. And they're a pure play security company. That was another thing that was appealing to us. And they've been a solid growth company quarter over quarter, year over year.

How does this fit in with Intel's strategy? James: When you think about things like power efficiency or performance or Internet connectivity as major technology areas where you have multiple investments, multiple products--security is like that. Security is applicable to our products in the data center, laptops, desktops, and any Atom-based devices--whether they're embedded, TVs, automotive, or phones and tablets. Security is a major purchase criteria and a concern. So, it spreads across the whole product line. … Read more