Flex Bits: HPC News with Snark for Friday, Feb. 11, 2011

In a sweeping tradition that’s been around since last week, insideHPC brings you Flex Bits: News with Snark:

• Iranian supercomputer! Sanctions can’t stop the proliferation of HPC, or even Justin Bieber for that matter.

• Oracle and Fujitsu to continue developing SPARC. Announcement makes no mention of Japan’s 10-Petaflop “K” supercomputer planned for 2012, which will feature 80,000 SPARC64 VIIIfx processors. Larry Ellison probably has room for the thing in his new $43M domicile.

• Is Bull the European HPC Leader? Hey wait, not so fast! (Ed. note: this pesky link has been repaired.)

• Bearish on the Bay. Scott McNealy thinks the Silicon Valley is going down the tubes. Imagine how Sun’s old neighbors in Menlo Park feel about Zuckerberg moving in.

• More heads roll at AMD. At least they can keep busy playing McNealy’s Project Flogton (NOT GOLF, spelled backward) game.

• Who has the fastest OpenCL device? Now you can benchmark them and see for yourself.

• Same Difference? Researchers debate the difference between Cloud and Grid, not to be confused with Today’s vs. Yesterday’s Newspaper.