Snarknado – HPC News Bits for Monday, Aug. 19

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The stories keep streaming in as the Summer winds down, so here is the HPC News with Snark for Monday, August 19.

  • Who needs benchmarks when we can just multiply? After making an excellent case for not running the Linpack benchmark on Blue Waters because it is not representative of real system performance, NCSA decided to tout the machine’s newly upgraded “peak” performance instead. In related news, the peak performance of all the 6 million unsold Windows Surface RT tablets is a really big, meaningless number, but at least we know what it costs.
  • Windows HPC minus Windows. After abandoning HPC a few years ago, Microsoft hopes they’ll do better this time if they call it something else.
  • Hot Interconnects comes to Cooling Cisco. After beating the street and then curiously announcing 4000 layoffs last week, the ubernetworking company will host the annual HOTi event this week in San Jose. InsideHPC will be on hand to capture the talks and bring you lastest on future datacenter networking technologies. Registration is still open, so please join us.
  • Photon Torpedos. Speaking of networking futures, Mellanox completed its acquisition of silicon photonics company Kotura last week. Meanwhile, Intel offered a sneak peak of its pending 1.6Tbps MXC optical interconnect for servers.

  • CRAY T94 on eBay. For your collectors out there, a genuine liquid-cooled CRAY T94 is available on eBay for the discounted price of $9650. As the last of Cray’s big vector machines, the 3.6 Gigaflop serial #7021 originally went for something like $5 Million. I remember because I wrote the brochure.
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