supercomputer

At one time, Linux Networx was one of the industry's premier open-source players. I personally kicked the tires on joining and loved the innovative work it was doing. Yesterday the company, which has struggled the past few years through painful venture funding rounds and increased industry competition, tied the knot with SGI.

Or, rather, its assets did. Not much was left to sell to SGI

It's a rough business. Linux Networx used to have 15 supercomputers to its credit (on the list of Top 500 Supercomputers) but now has nine. It's the nature of the beast: you'… Read more

MENLO PARK, Calif.--It got delayed a few months, but a new, somewhat unusual supercomputer from Sun Microsystems will get formally unveiled next week.

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas will dedicate a Constellation System from Sun on February 22, said John Fowler, executive vice president of systems at Sun. He was speaking at the company's global media summit here Wednesday. (Technically, the computer started running earlier this month: the dedication is sort of like the official coming-out party.) After TACC, Sun hopes to start selling Constellations to more customers.

The linchpin of Constellation … Read more

From a marketing perspective, multicore processors are an easy sell. Two brains are better than one. Four brains are better than two. You get the idea.

The challenge is that a whole lot of computer software has been designed to take advantage of ever-faster brains, not a computer packed full of them. It's a particular challenge for desktop and mobile computers. On the server and supercomputing side, the notion of parallel computing has been around for some time.

In the PC world, software makers have been scrambling to find new ways of thinking as Moore's law is quickly … Read more

A new connector that transmits information using pulses of light could replace the copper wires that connect computational cores in supercomputers. IBM's "silicon Mach-Zehnder electro-optic modulator" takes up less space than traditional copper wires--and 90 percent less energy. At speeds up to 100 times faster than wires, it's a likely harbinger of smaller, faster, more energy-efficient supercomputers.

Read the full story at BBC: "Light to shrink computer clusters"

In a sign that the web world finally recognizes its debt to open source, Yahoo is opening up an advanced research and development center - with a massive computing lab - to allow developers and researchers to test their systems software. In other words, Yahoo is opening up one of its labs to let people experiment with Yahoo/Internet-scale applications.

This is very cool.

Sunnyvale-based Yahoo said the program is intended to leverage its leadership in Hadoop, an open source distributed computing sub-project of the Apache Software Foundation, to enable researchers to modify and evaluate the systems software running on a 4,000 processor supercomputer provided by Yahoo.… Read more

Microsoft released the public beta of Windows HPC Server 2008 for running large computing clusters, part of its plan to creep into supercomputing.

HPC Server 2008 is the successor to Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003. HPC Server runs on the individual servers in a cluster and also comes with higher-level software that coordinates all of the members of a cluster. Microsoft says it achieved a 30 percent improvement in Linpack, a commonly used supercomputing benchmark, on its production cluster with 2,048 processor cores.

HPC is also being used on a 1,151 node cluster at the Holland Computing Center … Read more

Editors' note: This blog initially misspelled the name of a record holder for solving a Rubik's Cube. He is Leyan Lo.

Clearly, I've been doing something wrong.

Since the early 1980s, when I got my first Rubik's Cube, I've never been able to solve it. Oh, sure, I got one side done, and maybe even two. Or, I could break the thing open and put it back together in its original, solved position.

But now, according to the BBC, a supercomputer has determined that a Rubik's Cube is solvable in less than 26 moves, regardless … Read more

Making a supercomputer used to require teams of dedicated scientists, millions in federal research grants, and lots of specialized components that took years to design.

Thanks to clustering and other advances, a group of well-trained grad students can build one from off-the-shelf parts. As a result, the rankings in the Top 500 Supercomputers list changes more rapidly than the standings on Dancing with the Stars.

So with commoditization, what's the most expensive thing? The cooling system? The processors?

Weirdly, it's the memory, says Andy Bechtolsheim, senior vice president of Sun Microsystems' systems group and a co-founder of Sun, … Read more

We have a love-hate relationship with that ultimate object of masculine obsession, the remote control. On one hand, it's risen to a deified status; on the other, we're sick and tired of having so many of them hiding under every cushion in the house.

Yes, we've tried all kinds of universal models, including the very first version of that brick-like Sony remote whose size was matched only by its price. The best part, of course, is that it was so complicated we never learned how to use it. So as tempting as they may sound, we can'… Read more