Archives for March 2007

IBM scientists are presenting a prototype optical receiver chipset today at the 2007 Optical Fiber Conference. From SeekingAlpha: It is said to be at least 8x faster at 160 gigabits of data/second, than currently available optical components. That’s fast enough to download a high definition feature-length film in one second, versus at least 30 minutes […]

I’ll spare you the expansion of the acronym, but Raytheon Co. (yes, that Raytheon) is discussing details of a computer architecture that can adopt different forms depending on the application targeted for it (like an FPGA). The chip was “developed for the Department of Defense to address the large data volume of sensor systems.” There […]

Totally non-HPC related, but cool: It is fitting that James Watson, co-discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA in 1953, should become the first person to have his genome fully sequenced. More at BioIT World’s site.

Fuel for Sun/Rackable acquisition theorists: Sun has a datacenter in a box. Rackable just announced a datacenter in a box. Coincidence? [Update: more at The Register on Rackable’s offering and comparisons with Sun. I’ll say this, Rackable’s solution is prettier.] 

From the Good Stuff department: Cray Inc., AMD, and CSC, the Finnish IT center for science, today announced a University Grant Program that will give students and young researchers in Finland access to the new Cray XT4 supercomputer installed at CSC. Grant recipients will be able to leverage the immense computing power provided by the […]

I’m paying a lot of attention to what Sun is doing in HPC these days, partly because they are working very hard to say a lot and say it often in multiple channels. Of the currently crop of tier 2 and higher HPC vendors, Sun is doing the best job of getting its message out […]

Michael Suess over at Thinking Parallel has a thoughtful short piece on potential inflection points in the value curves between using the fruits of the gaming world (GPUs and Cell processors) and traditional CPUs, mostly motivated by all the press that Folding@Home is getting these days (for example, here). He briefly considers why FLOPS don’t […]

It’s Friday, it’s sunny and 81 degrees here at Studio H, and reader/contributor Chris Aycock is passing on just the rumor I need to round out my week: Rackable Systems’  shares shot up Thursday as the server maker became the latest company to get swept up in a frenzy of speculation about acquisitions in the […]

The Register recently had an inside the labs experience at Intel and got to see first hand what the company is doing to make its 80-core vision of the future a reality. And evidently a lot of what it’s doing is trying to convince everyone-developers, consumers, and dreamers-that there is a reason to bother. I’m […]

Interesting advertorial over at Forbes.com that focuses on nanotechnology. One of the examples that come up in the interview with Dr. Paul M. Horn (director of research at IBM Corporation) is the work they are doing collaboratively with Scripps on the avian flu: With the avian flu, we’ve modeled the virus on supercomputers, and we […]