Ok, so Shakespeare was talking about a name, not a definition. But Chris Willard is getting his Webster on as he captures an illuminating and entertaining list of some of the definitions of “supercomputer.”

Some of my favorites:

Any computer built by Seymour Cray

Any computer that turns a compute bound problem into an I/O bound problem.

Any computer where the compute time is

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NVIDIA announced today that UIUC has been named the first CUDA Center of Excellence.

In addition to the appointment, NVIDIA has donated $500,000 to UIUC for the development of parallel computing facilities and the continuation of its research programs.

What’s it all about?

“The CUDA Center of Excellence program rewards schools that

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Melisa Norr, writing at the outstanding CRA Policy Blog

The Emergency Supplemental for FY08 — the last chance to rectify the appropriations shortfall for science caused by the FY 08 Omnibus Appropriation — has been signed by the President and is now law. Though science funding made it into the supplemental — one of the few

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Doug Eadline has a post over at ClusterMonkey that references a really cool thing.

In case you hvae not noticed, the ARC division has created a certification program for computer systems administrators wanting to advance in the field of high performance and high throughput computing

From the certification site

GridsWatch Grid Portal team - with Georgetown University’s Advanced Research Computing is

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Clayco Inc of St. Louis announced today that it was named the prime construction manager for the new NCSA Petascale Computing Facility at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  The 90,000 square foot facility will house the the upcoming NSF Track 1 machine, Blue Waters, built by IBM.  What goes under 90,000 square feet?  Glad …

Microsoft has just cut a press release detailing the latest racing team to utilize high performance computing gear in order to gain a competitive edge.  This time, however, the team does not race in Formula1 and is not based in the EMEA.  Chip Ganassi Racing, most widely known as a competitive NASCAR team, is utilizing …

Mellanox has announced that it will provide ConnectX 20Gb/s [4X DDR] Infiniband adapters to IBM in support of the iDataPlex system.  The iDataPlex system is IBM’s multi-core-based, dense processing platform aimed at boosting Web 2.0 [read internet multimedia] performance.

With our innovative iDataPlex system design, customers realize significant savings on power and cooling, as well as

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IBM has released details of a project working with candy giant Mars Inc. and the US government directed a studying the genetic code of cocoa trees.  The overarching goal being to develop methods by which to safeguard the world’s chocolate supply.  The group with use BlueGene, LLNL’s supercomputer, to sequence and analyze the entire cocoa …

Michael Feldman has an interesting blog post at HPCwire this week on big data

Fresh from ISC’08 and the associated petaflop-mania, I noticed that the latest issue of Wired magazine has a series of articles on the ramifications of petabyte data. The issue is titled “The End of Science,” and the main thesis is that these enormous data sets are

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That’s .25 billion pixels people. We’ve got a (smaller) powerwall at my work, and it gets pretty hot. I imagine you’ll have to wear a heat suit to use this thing.

Here is the lede

Developed by scientists and engineers in the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at Ames, the 128-screen hyperwall-2, capable of rendering one quarter billion pixel graphics, is the

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From Ashlee Vance writing at The Register on Monday this week

We’ve confirmed that Sun is looking to push the UltraSPARC Tx line to even greater heights with a 16-core, 16-thread per core eight-socket server. So, each socket is chewing through an insane 256 threads. And the eight-socket box will do 2,048 threads….Rock does, in fact, have 16 cores as

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From Sun’s HPC Watercooler (which, by the way, gets kudos for the onslaught of HPC-related video they’ve been putting up on the web)

In this video, Philippe Trautmann presents on the Sun European HPC Community. Sun’s HPC European efforts start at the Executive Briefing Center and Solution Center based at Linlithgow, UK.

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From BusinessDay today

IBM has opened its Africa Innovation Centre in Johannesburg to help companies develop their IT skills and help workers meet business challenges in sub- Saharan Africa.

The centre, which opened yesterday, is the first of its kind on the continent, and forms part of IBM’s commitment to invest $120m in Africa within the next two years to support

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Not HPC, but interesting, so I’ll keep it short. From ElectronicsWeekly.com

The Cell microprocessor is going into laptops. Toshiba will use it in versions of its Qosmio laptops which start selling next month in Japan.

…While the Qosmio laptops will still use an Intel Core 2 Duo to run the OS, Cell will do intensive processing tasks such as upscaling

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This from China Daily today

Dawning 5000A, with a capability of 160 trillions of computing operations per second, is signed to be installed in the Shanghai Supercomputer Center (SSC) which specializes in super computing outsourcing services for daunting jobs such as genome mapping, quake appraisal, precise weather forecast, mining survey and huge stock exchange data.

Looks like the Chinese aren’t exactly …