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SGI reported its Q4 and Fiscal 2007 financial performance yesterday. A Reuters analysis shows that the company lost $36.9M in the quarter just ended, an increase of over $16M from its Q4 2006 lost of $20.4M.

But there is some good new; the company grew its core product sales by 27% …

IBM has recently made two discoveries in the small that will help push nanotechnology forward. The first is a report of improved ability to measure the magnetic anisotropy of an atom. This is important because it relates to a single atom’s ability to store information.

With further work it may be possible to build

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AMD announced today they’re adding new instruction set extensions designed to improve performance in HPC, multimedia, and security apps.

The extensions, called SSE5, evolve the Streaming SIMD Extensions introduced originally in 1999. Although AMD is making the specification available starting today to foster a dialogue with developers, they won’t appear in …

IBM has announced the QS21 cell-based blade, replacing the QS20. The QS21 offers several improvements over the 20. According to coverage at eWeek

In addition to including two Cell processors, each running at 3.2GHz, IBM has increased the system memory from 1GB to 2GB per processor. The new blade system also supports

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Story on the wires this morning about AMD’s partnership with VMware to improve support for migration of virtual machines between different versions of AMD processors.

AMD-V Extended Migration provides the necessary support for virtualization software to mask the differences between CPU generations, facilitating the safe live migration of virtual machines between servers running different generations of AMD processors. This includes

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Hmmm…not sure about that headline.

The DailyTech is reporting details from Intel’s latest roadmap showing three Penryn-based Xeons with a 1600 MHz front-side bus.

The three new 1600 MHz front-side bus processors are available in dual-core and quad-core models. Quad-core Xeon E5472 and E5462 are the first quad-core models to receive the 1600 MHz front-side bus treatment.

…Intel has one 1600 MHz

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Networking startup Woven Systems has been getting increasing attention over the past several months in our community. HPCwire included them in their half-year retrospective on HPC, and their adaptive routing experiment with Sandia and Chelsio has also gotten a lot of attention.

I spent some time …

HPC vendor Cray announced today researchers using PSC’s XT gear are developing new techniques for severe weather prediction

Researchers from the University of Oklahoma’s Center for Analysis and Prediction of Storms (CAPS) and the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) employed an innovative combination of high resolution and controlled manipulation of numerical model parameters and starting conditions to develop strategies

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You’ve no doubt heard of Intel’s Common System Interface by now. This is Intel’s shot at moving its own architectures away from the frontside bus in the way that AMD did with HyperTransport.

The Reg is reporting the work of analyst David Kanter at Real World Technologies who has dug through patents and interviewed engineers to put together a detailed …

This news is several weeks old, but I didn’t see it until ClusterMonkey picked it up yesterday. The Monkey is reporting that the University of Nebraska at Omaha is building a new supercomputer.

The machine is reported to have 1,151 Dell servers with dual-socket Barcelonas for a total of over 9,200 cores. And here’s an interesting bit:

This system is by

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Clay Breshears comments on a recent announcement that Purdue is set to begin studying when to introduced parallel programming for undergraduates:

With a three-year grant from the NSF, the project will study how and when to introduce parallel programming concepts and work as early as possible within a student’s course of study. It is anticipated that the results of

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The Register’s Ashlee Vance has a profile of hardware startup Gear6.

The Silicon Valley-based firm ships a pair of caching appliances. These RAM-based boxes plug right into existing Ethernet networks and work as complements to disk-based shared storage systems. As a result, applications that depend on accessing large data sets tend to enjoy dramatic performance improvements by getting much of

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Story in BioIT World yesterday, but I’ve seen lots of other pointers to it lately:

The site, called SciVee, will allow scientists to upload highly technical papers. But it will also let the researchers post accompanying video presentations that serve as quicker, more approachable guides to their work.

http://www.scivee.tv/.

One of the difficulties that we’ll face on the road to quantum computers is creating something like the transistor: a device that facilitates the flow of bits of information in a computer.

The problem is that in a quantum computer bits of information are transferred via single photons that are harder to work with than the electrons we use today.

But according …

From the CRA’s policy blog

The National Coordinating Office for Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) — the ~$3 billion, 14 agency program that constitutes the federal effort in IT research and development — is looking for comment by the end of September on its draft plan for advanced networking research and development.

You can find the plan at …