Archives for March 2007

This article is from last week, and I meant to comment on it, but never did. IT World Canada has identified what it thinks are the top 5 IT trends for 2007. Number 4: Host hardware: Supercomputing for the masses. …Large technology players such as IBM, Sun Microsystems Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. already sell computing […]

For what it’s worth: Ex-Dell staffer and Austin resident David Weaver has started selling small containers full of the debris left over from the so-called “Intel Shell” – a never completed Intel facility destroyed last month. So, for the low-low price of $20, you can own Intel’s ashes. More here.

Interesting article over at Ars Technica with speculation about what the new PhysX processor from Ageia looks like and a discussion of commodity processors, the Cell, GPUs, and how new silicon can break into the HPC market. A few excerpts… What the PhysX might look like: Based on things I’ve heard and on my reading […]

IBM announced yesterday that they’ve started making Cell processors at 65nm. In addition to serving as the digital heartbeat of Sony Computer Entertainment’s PLAYSTATION®3, the chip also appears in IBM’s BladeCenter servers. For a point of reference, though it’s not apples to apples, Intel started offering 65nm chips over a year ago, and AMD announced […]

The HPC R&D Act, which we’ve talked about before, passed the house on a voice vote yesterday according to the CRA’s Policy Blog: The bill would amend the original High Performance Computing and Communications Act of 1991 (HPCC) to attempt to provide sustained, transparent access for the research community to federal HPC assets, assure a […]

Prof at NC State wires together 8 PlayStation 3 consoles running Linux to create the “world’s first PS3-based academic cluster.” Alrighty then. Short article at engadget.com.

Remarks by Jeannette Wing, head of the CS department at Carnegie Mellon, posted last week at Computerworld.com: Wing sees her job as making esoteric research issues real, immediate and relevant to users. “Today in security, we are patching systems and fighting viruses and worms and doing source code analysis using techniques that the basic research […]

The Register cover’s Intel’s new lower power Xeon offerings: Server customers will now have access to a pair of 50-watt Xeon chips. The products consume between 35 per cent and 60 per cent less power than existing four-core Xeons which run between 80 and 120 watts. The lower power processors mark a continued effort on […]

Computerworld has an article about the use of HPC by smaller companies trying to gain competitive advantage. The article was spurred by the activity in the Senate last week on the America COMPETES Act culminating in Bill Gates’ testimony. Two companies are covered: Simpson Strong-Tie Co., a company that makes metal connectors used in construction, […]

SGI and Mitrionics have been recognized for their-FPGA accelerated BLAST calculations in BioIT World’s top ten trends for 2007. From SGI’s web site: # 5 Top BioIT Trend for 2007 as described in the Dec/Jan 2007 Issue of BioIT World — Vol. 5, no. 10. “Reconfigurable Accelerator Boards (FPGAs) — FPGA technology has been the […]