Archives for January 2007

Here’s something I didn’t know: Intel has a small server line. And according to Ashlee Vance, they’ve just scooped up a bunch of Google business from their customers competitors, IBM, Sun, Dell, and HP. It produced a bespoke server line full of low-power, low-cost components that matched Google’s demanding specifications. The news evidently comes from […]

An article in The Register notes claims by AMD that its quad core Opteron, due mid-2007, is 40% faster than the Intel 5300 AMD’s ‘Barcelona’ 65nm quad-core server processors will lick Intel’s four-core Xeon 5300 series, out-performing its rival by up to 40 per cent, the chip maker claimed this week, according to a variety […]

Linux Magazine has selected The Portland Group as one of its Top 20 Companies To Watch in 2007 (free reg required). PGI compilers are commonly used in our community on AMD and Intel systems. From PGI’s press release: “The Portland Group is meeting the challenge of processor complexity and the growing need for high-performance parallel […]

Earlier this month NERSC received the first installment of its new Cray XT4 supercomputer. The delivery of 3,336 computational dual core nodes marks the start of the installation of the full system later this summer. From NERSC (links to PDF including pics of the new machine): Named “Franklin” after Benjamin Franklin, America’s first scientist, the […]

Sun has snapped up the patent rights for capacitive coupling technology from Polychip, Inc. The technology allows for computer chips in close proximity to connect to one another without wires between them. Sun also did its own work in this area during its failed HPCS bid. More details the arrangement here.

In the “I didn’t know they used HPC gear for that” department: Konami Gaming, which makes player tracking software for casinos, uses SGI Altix and TP9300/TP9500 storage systems to track player bets in casinos. The Konami software tracks a players’s individual table bets and slot machine pulls, providing real time feedback to players and casino […]

For those of you out there running smaller but growing data centers, Isilon launched the IQ 200 this week, though the company says it already has 50 units in the field. The system uses Isilon’s OneFS filesystem and can host up to 24 1U nodes at 2 TB each. Costs start around $40,000.

For those of you who keep track of this sort of thing, Sun reported Tuesday that they made money in the 2nd fiscal quarter of 2007. Net income for the second quarter of fiscal 2007 on a GAAP basis was $126 million or $0.03 per share on a diluted basis, as compared with a net […]

As HPCwire reported recently, the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) and the Free Standards Group (FSG) have announced they’ll merge and form The Linux Foundation. Successful proprietary software companies, for instance, do several important things well: backwards compatibility, promotion, interoperability, developer support, and more. …The Linux Foundation has been founded to help close the gap […]