Archives for April 2007

Cray’s CEO Pete Ungaro was profiled in The Register last week. It’s an interesting short read that touches on Cray’s odd position and a private company in which the US government has a large interest. Cray remains a weird sort of public company. Federal funds keep it humming. So, when Washington is spooked and needs […]

….and the House R&D Caucus are having lunch today at noon. The topic is The Role of Basic Research in Innovation, Economic Competitiveness and National Security. Not really HPC stuff, but one of my professional heroes, Professor Anita Jones, will be briefing during the lunch. She was the Director of Defense Research and Engineering during […]

Reader Jay Blair pointed me to another interesting article this week. This time the article is over at Technology Review, and covers a new technology to enable vendors to patch defective computer hardware without breaking out a soldering iron. The system, called Phoenix, is being developed by professor Josep Torrellas at the University of Illinois […]

From thegreengrid.org: The Green Grid, a non-profit consortium dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems, today announced plans for a technical summit to be held April 18-19 in Denver, Co. The summit, which will be the first since the formal launch of the organization earlier this year, is expected to […]

SeekingAlpha today is covering IBM’s announcement of a new approach to chip production: IBM says after more than a decade of research, it’s ready to take 3-D chips from the ‘lab to the fab’, extending Moore’s Law to new limits: dramatically reducing chip size while boosting speed. Using 3-D chip stacking technology called “through-silicon vias,” […]

The Register had coverage earlier this week on Sun’s forthcoming line of midrange and high-end servers, planned for announcement next week. The coverage is detailed, with too much to meaningfully excerpt. Here’s something to whet your appetite; if you’re interested, check out the whole thing: The Register can reveal in an exclusive that Sun next […]

From Computerworld.com earlier this week: Looking to help users to more easily build low-cost storage options for Solaris-based systems from multiple vendors, Sun Microsystems Inc. today announced plans to donate pieces of its storage application software and hardware technology to the OpenSolaris open-source developer community. Sun said the initiative will be rolled out over the […]

Nick Carr has another piece that caught my attention today, this time on a “new” cooling technology. UK company Very-PC is proposing submersion of computers for better cooling: In tests, server racks were immersed in tanks of oil normally used to keep machinery cool. A refrigeration unit positioned below was used to create convection currents […]

Nicholas Carr’s Rough Type has a recent piece reporting on Sony’s move to get itself a little attention in the money for cycles crowd: Sony is considering tying together gamers’ PlayStation 3 consoles into a global supercomputing grid that could be used for commercial applications, reports the Financial Times today. Sony has already teamed up […]

Reader Jay Blair asked me to pass along this info on goings on DICE Alliance Day at the beginning of May in Ohio. Both the workload management best practices and the PFLOPS workload panel look pretty interesting: (Jay is) organizing a set of sessions on workload management for the DICE Alliance Day (http://www.avetec.org/dice/diceAlliance/DA07_overview.htm). Survey of […]