Flex Bits: HPC News with Snark for Friday, March 11, 2011

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Here are the News Bits for Friday, March 11, 2011:

  • Laser brain. This week Luxtera announced a new CMOS photonics-based optical engine, signaling a transition from Active Optical Cables to chip-sets. This will reportedly enable next generation 100 Gbps applications and  4×14 Gbps FDR InfinBand.
  • Internships! The Blue Waters Undergraduate Petascale Education Program is seeking both faculty and undergraduate students to participate in a year-long internship/mentoring program. This is a paid gig. Many more internship postings are available at HPC University.
  • Cloud Pilot. The good folks at CloudSwitch have published an eBook on How to Run a Successful Cloud Pilot.
  • Got room in the fridge? Spectra’s Jon Hiles ponders how much beer you could buy with the power bill savings if you archived all the world’s data on tape vs. disk.
  • What will be for sale in 2013? HP’s Marc Hamilton blogs on the company’s $30M bid for the NSF Extreme Digital (XD) program, the pending successor to the TeraGrid.
  • ARMed invasion of HPC? Our columnist Thomas Thurston was right; Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang told analysts this week that there will be supercomputers based on ARM chips. Don’t wait; Jeff Squyres informs us that Open MPI now supports ARM!