Tech giants rev up their supercomputers

With a new Top 500 list about to be unveiled, hardware heavyweights jockey for position.

Trivia question: What's the most expensive thing in supercomputers?

Thanks to clustering and other advances, a group of well-trained grad students can build a supercomputer from off-the-shelf parts. But some costs still add up.
June 26, 2007

New IBM supercomputer achieves petaflop

Big Blue breaks into the quadrillion calculation range with new Blue Gene/P supercomputer.
June 26, 2007

HP and Microsoft eye supercomputer market

Tech giants want to give high-performance computers more "mass market" appeal by making them easier to deploy, support and manage.
June 26, 2007

Sun eyes supercomputing glory

The linchpin is a piece of hardware that conducts traffic between the servers, memory and data storage.
Image: Sun's Constellation System
June 26, 2007