Archives for March 2007

Intel and AMD

Reader Jeff Keasler emailed me today with a pointer to Tom’s Hardware Guide for great performance information on the new crop of chips. He gave me permission to post his email, so here it is (thanks, Jeff!): John, Tom’s hardware guide is perhaps the most unbiased source for hardware performance you can find. They do […]

Wall Street, HPC, and the power struggle

This isn’t news since it was published two weeks ago, but it looks like an interesting read. Wall Street and Technology has an article on the struggles big finance is having as it ramps up really large HPC efforts Over the past few years, Wall Street has taken a brute force approach to HPC, populating […]

Sun's chip shot

(Believe me, I’m not proud of that one). SeekingAlpha reports that Sun is going to start selling its chips to the world again in a new business unit headed by Sun’s current storage head and former Sparc chief. Software and server manufacturer Sun Microsystems has announced it is relaunching its Sparc microelectronics group, which will […]

Intel's family planning

Intel’s press release has a lot of glossy facts about their upcoming Penryn and Nehalem architectures. You might be interested in a read if you’re chip-inclined. Penryn is the forthcoming family using 45nm and the new “hi-k” gates that all the kids are talking about (we talked about it too: here, here, here, and a […]

Intel's Nehalem

From The Register yesterday: Intel’s long, strange journey toward mimicking AMD’s processors will end in 2008 with a brand new chip architecture called “Nehalem,” the company confirmed today. Intel’s fresh chips will have up to eight cores and a number of other bits and pieces found today’s in server, desktop and notebook chips from AMD. […]

IBM's cool discovery

Not a great title, but it’s late in the day. Reader Jason Blair has pointed us to an article over at Ars Technica about IBM’s discovery that how you pack the thermal paste on to a processor can make a big difference. The Cliff’s notes (but the whole thing is interesting if you have the […]

Dell learning from its recent HPC wins?

Dell has begun placing large HPC systems into a few centers around the world, like the one at 5,200 node Linux cluster at TACC, currently at #12 on The List. And they may have learned a few things from building those large clusters that they’re trying to build a market out of. The Register is […]

Power to the people

Speaking of the need to push HPC down into the underpinnings of every bit of science and engineering research in this country (which I seem to do every day), The Register is talking about PeakStream The beta version of PeakStream Workstation for Microsoft Windows serves the same function as its existing Linux counterpart. Developers can […]

New Mellanox gear

Mellanox announced this week new 10 and 20 Gb/s IB adapters with 1 microsecond latency. Release here.

More on containerized computing

I pointed recently to the newest entry in the containerized computing melee: Rackable’s Concentro. My big contribution was to point out that Rackable’s is prettier. Nicholas Carr has two posts on this. In the first he confirms that Rackable’s solution is, in fact, prettier. In the second he adds some analysis and points to two […]