HPCwire's 2006 roundup

HPCwire has an article summarizing the year in HPC. It’s interesting to see all the year’s major events right next to each other.

Some highlights:

Intel rebounds against AMD with a brand new processor microarchitecture. The Xeons finally achieve performance parity (and then some) against the current crop of Opterons.

After a six month delay, DARPA makes its HPCS Phase III selections, rewarding both IBM and Cray with a quarter of a billion dollars to reinvent supercomputing.

ORNL and LANL order the first two petaflop-class machines for 2008. The only real surprise: neither one is Blue Gene. In Japan, Riken announces a special-purpose petaflop machine, MDGrape-3.