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IBM's Roadrunner supercomputer was named the fastest supercomputer in the world Wednesday after breaking the petaflop barrier earlier this month.

(Credit: IBM)

Good news for green tech: The fastest supercomputer in the world is also one of the most energy efficient. That's according to the Top500 supercomputers list, to be released Wednesday at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany.

Twice yearly, the list measures the 500 most powerful computer systems available commercially. This year, the 31st time the list has been put together, the honor of top supercomputer goes to IBM's Roadrunner, which is housed at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory. It's the first system to reach 1.026 petaflops (1 petaflop is equal to a quadrillion, or one thousand trillion, calculations per second).

For perspective, last year's most powerful computer, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's BlueGene/L--also made by IBM--reached 208.6 teraflops. This year that computer ranked No. 2, reaching a max processing speed of 478.2 teraflops.

Fun fact: the fastest supercomputer in the world--used to monitor the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile--is really just a PlayStation 3 on steroids. Roadrunner is based on the IBM QS22 blades, which are built using advanced versions of the Cell processor in Sony's PS3. It also runs using x86 chips from Advanced Micro Devices, making it the world's first hybrid supercomputer.

In total, Roadrunner takes up 278 refrigerator-size server racks, and connects 6,562 dual-core AMD Opteron and 12,240 Cell chips.

IBM, which continues its dominance of supercomputing, makes 210 of the 500 systems, including 5 of the top 10. Hewlett-Packard is close behind, however. HP makes 183 of the fastest computers, including the No. 8 fastest system known as EKA, located in Computational Research Laboratories' data center in Pune, India.

Rounding out the top 10 is Sun Microsystem's Ranger at No. 4, Cray's Jaguar at No. 5, SGI's Encanto at No. 7, and SGI's Altix at No. 10.

On the processor side, Intel dominates the high-end market with 75 percent of all systems on the list and 90 percent of the quad-core based systems that were ranked.

Supercomputing, which pits the highest-end machines against challenges such as forecasting the global climate in coming decades or finding oil reservoirs underground, is a fast-changing field. The Top500 list once again had the most turnover compared with the preceding list, according to the researchers who compile it.

The main measurement used in compiling the list is the Linpack measurement, which puts each system through its paces by having to solve a dense system of linear equations.

The Top500 acknowledges that Linpack isn't a complete test of system performance, but it's a way to test for performance on a similar problem across each system. The need for a more complete benchmarking system has been under discussion for several years.

Some additional interesting statistics about the June 2008 list:

* Quad-core processors are used in just over half of the systems.

* The bulk of the systems (208 of the 500) contain between 2,049 and 4,096 processors. That's more than double the systems that used that amount just six months ago.

* Four of the top five computers (Nos. 1, 2, 3, and 5) are located in U.S. Department of Energy labs.

* The U.S. continues to be home to the most computing power in the world. Just over half of the systems (257) are located in the U.S. The U.K. is next with 53, followed by Germany with 46, France with 34, Japan with 22, and China with 12.

After "not specified," the most popular application area for these superfast computers is finance (15.2 percent of the list), followed by research (10 percent), geophysics (9.8 percent), information service (6.2 percent), and service (5.2 percent).

Behind the MediaSmart Connect's fold-down front panel is a USB port and a slot for an optional removable hard drive.

(Credit: HP)

Hewlett-Packard's line of MediaSmart TVs includes the built-in ability to stream digital media from your home network and the Internet straight to their screens. But for the vast majority of us who don't own an HP TV, the company will soon have a second option: the MediaSmart Connect. The little black box connects to your home network (via its built-in 802.11n Wi-Fi or wired Ethernet) and streams a wide variety of digital audio, photo, and video files--including content from compatible Internet services (including Live365, Vongo, CinemaNow, and MovieLink).

The MediaSmart Connect should be able to pull digital files from any UPnP and DLNA compliant storage devices on your home network--beyond standard Windows PCs, that includes network attached storage devices such as HP's own MediaSmart Server and Media Vault. It can also double as a Windows Media Center Extender when interfacing with Media Center-enabled versions of Windows Vista--allowing the streaming of live or recorded TV at HD resolutions. The MediaSmart Connect doesn't have any on-board storage, but users can use the box to pull compatible media straight from an HP Pocket Media Drive (found on the company's PC desktops) or a standard USB flash drive.

The MediaSmart Connect will be available later this summer for $349, and is now available for preorder. (If it looks familiar, it's because HP has been teasing us with it since January's Consumer Electronics Show.) It'll include a learning remote that can control up to four other devices, an HDMI cable, and a $20 CinemaNow coupon. To drum up publicity for the product's launch, HP is offering a trade-in program where 100 people can exchange their old digital media adapter for the MediaSmart Connect. The company is also teaming with Microsoft to offer a series of four online "webinars" to demonstrate the product's features over the next few weeks. Feel free to check them out, but don't be surprised if you're just getting an infomercial for the product in question.

We'll be doing a detailed hands-on review of the MediaSmart Connect once we get a final production sample in July. (Also on deck: the similar Linksys DMA2200.) Until then, the floor is open: do you have any interest in the MediaSmart Connect, or in Windows Media Center Extenders in general? Is the whole idea of streaming media in the home just a niche market that will never go mainstream? Or would you prefer to go with an Xbox 360, which handles nearly all of the same media streaming functions, and adds game playback to boot?

HP MediaSmart Connect product page

Hewlett-Packard announced Sunday that it has settled its patent-infringement lawsuits against rival PC maker Acer.

The confidential settlement agreement resolves three federal court lawsuits, as well as two U.S. International Trade Commission investigations between the parties.

HP sued Taiwan-based Acer in October 2007, alleging seven patent violations. The suits covered patents regarding technologies such as read/write optical drives, power management in notebooks, digital bus arrangement, thermal management and video control.

The suits sought to stop Taiwan-based Acer from exporting its PCs to the U.S. and selling them there. As a result of the settlement agreement, each action will be dismissed as to the parties.

The proliferation at Computex of ultra-small, inexpensive netbooks poses this pesky question: why are traditional ultra-compact laptops so expensive?

The Asus Eee PC 1000 debuted this week with a 10-inch screen, 40GB solid state drive, and Windows XP. Pricing has been rumored at between $600 and $700.

Features and size threaten to push the Eee PC 1000 netbook into a category traditionally referred to as subnotebooks--with one glaring difference: price.

Subnotebooks like the 11-inch Lenovo IdeaPad or Sony Vaio TZ series typically start at above $1,500 and go up from there, ranging up to $3,000.

HP mini-note and traditional ultra-portable notebooks: both ultra-compact designs, but big price gap

(Credit: HP)

But as netbooks inevitably add more features, analysts and industry insiders are beginning to wonder what will happen to the traditional laptop category. "(If) you add more (gigabytes) of storage and a bigger screen, I don't know what makes this any different than a normal laptop," said Avi Cohen, a managing partner at Avian Securities.

Cohen said the obvious downside is a slower Atom processor--compared with a mainstream Core 2 chip--but on the upside Atom has better battery life. "Arguably there's a category of consumers that don't need such high processing power. Or, at least, a different kind of processing power," Cohen said.

Maybe many more than computer makers realize. Industry sources familiar with Intel's netbook strategy also see a potential clash of categories eventually. "Of course, it's always been a concern, as (netbooks) gets more and more traction," said one source familiar with Intel's thinking on this topic.

And as netbooks add more features and creep up in price, Intel has to worry about the market confusion that may ensue. "Is a $700 laptop, even running Atom, a netbook?"--the source asked. That may be the question that laptop vendors and Intel will have to grapple with as the netbook category grows.

(An Intel company blog back in March described the netbook as a small laptop "designed for wireless communication and access to the Internet. And they cost about $250, making Netbooks a potentially disruptive and high volume market segment.")

Of course, subnotebooks like the HP 2510p, Lenovo IdeaPad, and Sony Vaio TZ offer more features than today's netbooks: faster processors, more memory, bigger hard disk drives, and usually larger screens than a netbook like the HP Mini-Note.

But two forces may be working against this purported advantage: One, all of these features may be overkill for a lot of consumers who use traditional, pricey subnotebooks for only email and simple Web browsing. And, two, netbook makers may continue to expand their offerings to push them closer to subnotebooks while keeping the price low.

This is something that Glenn Henry, CEO of Centaur, the Via Technologies subsidiary that designed the Isaiah processor, has said. "The one gigahertz (Isaiah) is plenty powerful enough to do lots of things," Henry said. Via is also targeting the low-cost netbook category--and has been for some time. Its C7 processor is currently used in the HP Mini-Note 2133.

"If this category continues like it is, at the end of the year you may have mega hard drive-based netbooks," said the source familiar with Intel's strategy. "Let's say someone comes out with a really nifty (design), it's got some extra features, a bigger screen, and a few extra bells and whistles. I don't think that's a netbook even if it's running an Atom processor."

What is it then? That's the $64,000 question.

Every so often, I wonder if Silicon Valley is all it's cracked up to be. Sure, the confluence of venture capital, universities, and lawyers make it a veritable petri dish for the formation of technology companies, but there are a lot of other great places for innovation, right?

Well, if you go strictly by market capitalization, and look at the top 10 information technology companies, 6 of them are based in Silicon Valley: Cisco Systems, Google, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Apple, and Oracle. In fact, if you map these company's headquarters, they'd all be inside a circle with a radius of just 10 miles. Amazing, when you think about it.

And these companies are far from just "headquartered" in Silicon Valley.

Google and Apple are very much centralized from a product and technology development standpoint.

Intel has research-and-development facilities in Oregon, Arizona, and Israel, but a significant amount of its R&D occurs at or near its Santa Clara, Calif., headquarters. The same is true of Cisco, though the networking giant owns several large subsidiaries--such as Scientific Atlanta--that are based elsewhere. Likewise for Oracle.

HP is somewhat more diversified, with product development for its Compaq unit in Houston, plus R&D facilities in Idaho, Oregon, and additional cities around the globe. But still, more of its R&D occurs in northern California than anywhere else.

Three of the four companies not based in Silicon Valley have research and development consolidated near their corporate headquarters: Microsoft in Redmond, Wash.; Qualcomm in San Diego; and Nokia in Finland.

IBM, on the other hand, is the most distributed company of the 10, with R&D facilities in New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, North Carolina, Texas, Minnesota, and a number of international locations, including London.

What does all this mean? Well, the data's essentially useless, unless you compare these companies to the same group, say 5 or 10 years ago. Luckily, I've got a good memory. It's not necessarily obvious from the data, but there does appear to be a trend toward more distributed R&D among large companies--if not domestically, then certainly internationally.

Although there are a number of new and growing U.S. technology hubs, none appears to be in a position to unseat Silicon Valley as the tech mecca.

Internationally speaking, China, India, Israel, Japan, and the United Kingdom each have technology development centers with tremendous growth potential. South Korea and Taiwan are nothing to sneeze at, either. Sure, they all have a way to go to match the confluence of resources and talent that Northern California offers. But the trend is there.

And while our qualitative analysis consists only of 10 companies, I do believe that it represents the industry as a whole.

In summary, as information technology penetrates further into the lives of more and more people, it stands to reason that innovation hubs will become more and more geographically distributed, if not also technically specialized.

And someday, a new technology may take root and ultimately supplant electronics as the driver of human innovation. It might be a form of biotechnology, nanotechnology, or something else entirely. In that case, all bets are off.

Updated 5/29/08 12:23 PM - Modification to paragraph on Intel R&D.

Strong sales in emerging markets boosted Hewlett-Packard's second-quarter earnings to $2.2 billion, or 87 cents a share, up 24 percent from a year earlier.

Revenue for the quarter rose 11 percent to $28.3 billion, the company said Tuesday.

Those figures beat analyst estimates of earnings per share of 85 cents and revenue of $28.1 billion, according to Thomson First Call.

Earnings excluding one-time items were $2.1 billion, or 80 cents a share.

HP forecast revenue for the third quarter to be about $27.3 billion to $27.4 billion and earnings per share excluding items to be 82 cents to 83 cents.

HP raised its full-year revenue forecast to between $114.2 billion and $114.4 billion, from previous guidance of $113.5 billion to $114 billion. Full-year per-share earnings excluding items are forecast to be $3.54 to $3.58.

Analysts were forecasting third-quarter earnings per share of 82 cents and revenue of $27.35 billion and full-year earnings per share of $3.53 and revenue of $114.2 billion.

Hewlett-Packard is often thought of as a conservative Silicon Valley institution, not an industry mover and shaker. Yet for the second time this decade, HP is sticking its neck out with a huge merger. First Compaq, now EDS. Wow!

Lots of industry people will certainly write or blog about corporate synergies and how this deal will affect the overall services industry, but my focus is a bit smaller. I believe this deal really ups the ante for HP in the networking space.

As a solutions provider and government outsourcer, EDS builds a lot of big data centers and enterprise applications that pull a lot of hardware along for the ride. The obvious conclusion is that HP can use its EDS arm to sell more servers but HP's networking group could actually be a bigger winner.

Large public/private sector deals tend to be anchored by Cisco networks. EDS won't change this overnight, but slowly but surely it will introduce HP ProCurve switching equipment into the mix. As ProCurve technology gains enterprise scale and functionality, this transition will become more pronounced; EDS will lead with HP ProCurve as its preferred networking solution. All of a sudden, the ProCurve enterprise vision of flat, intelligent switched networks gets a lot more real. And when chief information officers look at the price difference between Cisco and HP networking equipment, a ProCurve networking solution will surely look a lot more compelling.

This vision may seem a bit far-fetched since Cisco owns 80 percent to 90 percent of the enterprise market depending on whose numbers you believe. The thing is that we are in a period of massive networking changes. Data centers will be anchored by 10Gb Ethernet switches, networks will transition to IPv6, and network intelligence for activities like application acceleration, entitlement management, security, and WAN (wide-area network) optimization is changing the way networks are built and used. CIOs typically are more open-minded regarding big technology shifts, thus opening the door for other networking vendors.

HP along with Juniper and Nortel were already gearing up for this new fight. With EDS in tow, HP is in a much better position today then it was yesterday.

I'm not a big fan of surveys, so I don't quote them often. But a recent Consumer Reports survey about PC manufacturers listed Apple as No. 1 in tech support, with Lenovo second, Dell third, and HP dead last. I should also say that Dell came in second in desktops.

I thought the headline should be "Survey says leading PC maker HP dead last in tech support." But that's not what happened. The media hailed Apple, trashed Dell, and gave HP a pass.

Horror stories about Dell's support are all over the blogosphere. Why is that? I mean, why does the media give Dell such a hard time?

Because perception is reality. But aside from being a pithy statement, what does that really mean? ... Read more

One of the curses, I suppose, of knowing one's high-tech history is that way too many news items cause me to go, "Here we go again!"

The proximate tidbit this time is, of course, the news that Hewlett-Packard is acquiring services giant EDS for $13.9 billion. Various news organizations had previously pegged the deal value between $12 billion and $13 billion. The New York Times described it at a $12.6 billion cash transaction.

When we last saw this play, it was with Carly Fiorina in the role of HP's chief executive, looking to spend a reported $17 billion to $18 billion on PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting in 2000. A lousy set of quarterly results turned in by HP helped to scotch that deal. It also didn't help that a lot of observers thought that HP was offering way too much for an organization with $6.7 billion in annual revenues (2001) and about 33,000 employees.

IBM seemingly provided evidence of this view when it bought PwCC in 2002 for only about $3.5 billion. (A bit of an unfair comparison, given the economic and other events of 2001, but still.) Carly went on to get her acquisition kicks by gobbling up Compaq instead.

So what, if anything, is different this time around?

The money. I'll leave the detailed financial modeling to the appropriate specialists, but here are some back-of-the-envelope numbers. In 2000, HP was looking to pay more than two times the annual revenues for PwCC, which IBM ended up getting for about 0.6 times revenues instead. In this case, HP spent less money ($13.9 billion) for a larger ($22.1 billion annual revenues) organization. At least by this measure, HP's expenditure is therefore much more in line with what IBM eventually spent for PwCC than it is what HP had initially proposed.

Credit: Hewlett-Packard

Carly Fiorina

HP management capabilities. Especially after this acquisition, something that's really striking is just how closely HP has maintained the course that Carly laid out. There's a slight difference, of course. If one goes back a few years, the boat may have been on a sensible bearing, but it was springing leaks in just about every compartment.

Carly has argued that post-Compaq financial problems just needed more time to work themselves out. Perhaps--but I'm skeptical. In any case, Mark Hurd has made remarkably few changes to HP's strategic direction since he took over. The benefits of scale promised from the Compaq buy have indeed proven out. EDS represents growth of scale along another axis--services--that puts HP that much more in the mold of IBM. The difference from times past is that Mark has a track record for keeping things ship-shape.

HP has made services acquisitions before, but they've been targeted and specialized. The most recent was of EYP Mission Critical Facilities, a data center design specialist that gives HP some legitimate differentiation in the power and cooling game. EDS is broader and bigger than even PwCC would have been.

On the one hand, this means a lot of personnel and fixed costs of the sort that have been no small issue for IBM--the company HP is attempting to mirror in important ways. On the other hand, if you believe--as I do--that companies (especially in small and midsize businesses) are increasingly going to move their computing off their premises and into data centers run by specialists, then acquiring the sort of large-scale hosted services business that EDS includes among its many operations isn't a bad direction for a system supplier at all.