supercomputer

At some point during the flight over the Pacific from Tokyo, I seriously questioned my decision to take a detour rather than heading straight to Boston and home. It wasn't that I had no interest in attending the Supercomputing show, SC08, being held in Austin last week. It's just that I was coming off of what was already a two-week trip to Japan. However, Supercomputing has been getting more and more buzz in recent years--and I hadn't been able to attend previously because of conflicts--so duty beckoned.

I was glad I made it. It was an immensely … Read more

A Dell slide shown Tuesday was a reminder that a future 80-core processor is still in sight.

Flash back two years to the Intel Developer Forum when CEO Paul Otellini pledged to deliver an 80-core processor in five years.

Otellini said at the time that the chips will be capable of exchanging data at a terabyte a second and that the company hopes to have these chips ready for commercial production within a five-year window.

Michael Dell referred to a slide showing an 80-core chip Tuesday at SC08, a conference in Austin, Texas, focused on high-performance computing.

The trend of … Read more

Democratize IT. A banal catch phrase until you see off-the-shelf gaming boxes from PC maker Dell being used for visual supercomputing.

CEO Michael Dell showed the "Stallion" Visualization Cluster at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) running on standard Dell XPS gaming machines during his keynote Tuesday at SC08, a conference in Austin, Texas, focused on high-performance computing. (The keynote was streamed over the Web.)

The Stallion "visualization wall" uses XPS boxes to power 30-inch Dell displays. "The largest display of its kind in the world, at 307 million pixels," Michael Dell said.

"… Read more

In any rundown of the current computing constellation, you have to mention Microsoft's power with programmers being tethered to desktops and laptops (the vast majority of which run Windows). As for Google, that company is trying to dominate what it believes is the new frontier, cloud computing, where applications run on the Web. But Adobe is trying to run down the middle with a strategy that touches on both domains. CNET News' Stephen Shankland explains what's behind Adobe's thinking.

Today's stories:

Adobe wants to bridge gap between PCs and cloud… Read more

Correction, 10:38 a.m. PST: This story misidentified the maker of the Power processor. The maker is IBM.

Jaguar vs. Roadrunner. It could be a new Saturday morning cartoon, or a Hollywood franchise to replace an Alien vs. Predator series that surely must have run its course by now.

But no. It is instead a shorthand for the two fastest supercomputers in the world, as reported in the latest Top500 listing, released Monday in conjunction with the SC08 conference in Austin, Texas.

First place went to Roadrunner, an IBM supercomputer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Its performance in … Read more

Microsoft's entry into the supercomputing market took another step Tuesday as high-end system leader Cray announced plans for its first machine running the Windows HPC Server operating system.

Cray announced the CX1 supercomputer, which will run HPC Server 2008 and have list prices between $25,000 and $60,000--prices which make it the company's most affordable system ever.

"Cray sees Microsoft Windows becoming an increasingly important force in the HPC market," Cray Senior VP Ian Miller said in a statement. "With the Cray CX1 high productivity system and Windows HPC Server 2008, we're bringing … Read more

"All depends on your perspective," recalled an amused Fran Allen, not at all regretting her participation in a now-storied mid-1950s supercomputer project popularly known as "Stretch."

Even though IBM only built nine of the machines, Stretch left behind a legacy that remains a source of pride to the participants who were present at its creation.

"A lot of what went into that effort was later helpful to the rest of the industry," Allen said with the sort of … Read more

OAK RIDGE, Tenn.--If you want to see someone's face light up, try talking to a scientist in a supercomputer lab about their machines.

I had that experience last week when, as the last major stop on Road Trip 2008, I visited the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) at the Oak Ridge National Lab to get a quick look at what is certainly one of the top facilities of its kind in the world.

My host was computational scientist Bronson Messer, and during a whirlwind tour of the center, he showed me several of the world's most … Read more

IBM says it has developed a way to use one of its supercomputers to improve diagnosis and treatment of the widespread bone disease osteoporosis.

IBM Zurich Research Laboratory and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (also known as ETH Zurich) utilized an IBM supercomputer to develop a method of early diagnosis that they say trumps the current approach to measuring bone mass density, the computer company announced Monday.

According to the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, the current most widely recognized bone mass density test is conducted by a dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry, or DXA. However, … Read more