The Rocks development team has announced the latest production release of the the Rocks cluster management suite, version 5.0.  The much anticipated release went beta on April 1.  The latest version of Rocks adds two huge features, Xen virtualization support and fully programmable disk partitioning.

Currently, ISO’s are available for i386 and x86_64.  For more info …

NVIDIA has announced that it will be a founding member of Stanford University’s new Pervasive Parallelism Lab [PPL].  The PPL’s charter is to develop new techniques, tools and training materials to allow software engineers to harness the parallelism of multi-processor systems [including multi-core].

Parallel programming is perhaps the largest problem in computer science today and is

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If you are in the Salt Lake City area and have a spare 36 hours, LNXI is holding a public auction. More details at the link, but here is the announcement

Linux Networx, Inc.
Online Auction

Pursuant to the Assignment of the Benefit of Creditors of Linux Networx, Inc., Development Specialists, Inc., Assignee pending in the

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HPCWire is running a story today featuring the announcement from the University Information Technology Services [UITS] at Indiana University that they will now support projects mounting Lustre over high speed wide area networks [such as the TeraGrid].   The group has dedicated 350 terabytes of new storage to the initiative.  Stephen Simms, IU’s Data Capacitor Project …

Regular readers will no doubt remember Ethernet switch maker Woven Systems from previous coverage in this space. The company makes adaptively routed 10 Gbps Ethernet switches that can be ganged together to connect up to 4,000 servers while staying in layer 2 (and thus avoiding all that nasty overhead).

They’ve got news this week; Woven…

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Since HPCwire relaunched its web site over the weekend they’ve now got continuous feature stories. This one by Michael Feldman on the Intel/Cray relationship is a good one.

Intel is not talking about any specific microprocessor product line for the Cray systems, since it’s not on the chipmaker’s public roadmap yet. But

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Brooke Crothers over at c|net Blogs posted yesterday about another pearl in AMD’s bag of sorrow, this time caused by some bad communication with manufacturers using their new Phenom chip

AMD confirmed Monday that some motherboard suppliers are mismatching high-end quad-core Phenom processors with a lower-end chipset.

…”They’ve taken an enthusiast-class quad-core part

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HPC stalwart Cray, Inc. announced Q1 financial results today. Details at their site. Here’s the skinny

…Cray today announced financial results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2008. Revenue for the quarter was $26.1 million compared to $47.1 million in the prior year period. The company reported a net loss for

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Volker Will posts over at his MS blog on a series of webcasts coming to a screen near you on Microsoft’s HPC tools. There are webcasts coming on HPC Server 2008 management and diagnostics, high availability, job scheduling, and “Future of Multi/Many-Core and the Convergence of Client and Cluster in Parallel …

c|net’s News.com reported yesterday that the Microsoft has handed out $500,000 in grants to four universities for research in energy efficient computing as part of its Sustainable Computing Program.

The University of Tennessee was awarded research money to develop frameworks to account for power and performance improvements in virtualized

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Dan Reed points to my article on HPC procurements and non-recoverable engineering expenses at HPCwire last week, and amplifies some of what I attributed to him along with a pointer to a recent essay at SIAM News that you’ll want to read.

By the way, HPCwire has a spiffy new web site that allows you to leave comments. …

eWeek.com has an article on Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s comments last week at the Web 2.0 Expo. From the article

The CEO, charged with driving Sun forward in an increasingly competitive market where systems vendors are turning their attention to Internet-based—or cloud—computing, cast aside the idea that companies just want several one-way

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Cray and Intel have announced today that they have inked a multi-year agreement to advance high performance computing on Intel microprocessors. What what what!? Cray will deliver these advancements on their future supercomputing platforms.

We’re excited at the potential of bringing together Intel’s powerful silicon expertise and Cray’s industry leadership in

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The International Papaya Genome Consortium, led by researchers at the University of Hawaii have announced the completion of the Papaya Genome Sequencing Project. The two year effort utilized SGI Altix and InfiniteStorage products to sequence 372 million base pairs. This makes the disease-resistant “SunUp” papaya to be the first fruit and the first transgenic crop to be sequenced.

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Network Equipment Technologies, Inc. today announced that Colfax International will offer its NX5000 series of Infiniband bridging solutions.  What is Infiniband bridging you say? Its essentially the idea of encapsulating the various Infiniband protocols and paradigms over long-haul transfer mediums.  In using this technology, one can create very high bandwidth [RDMA] virtual clusters and networks …