Servers and business storage

What's the 'Internet of Everything' worth? $613 billion, Cisco reckons

Cisco Systems wants its customers to know that there is a huge amount of money to be made if they focus their strategy and IT budget on what the company and others call the Internet of Everything.

That's the idea that more than half of the people and 99 percent of the things on the planet are unconnected and that by connecting them and riding the wave of industry transformations, such as smart factories, digital health, mobile collaboration, virtual assistants, and connected commercial vehicles, giant profits will follow.

In other words, the companies that invest in the "connections … Read more

Nvidia's graphics brawn powers supercomputing brains

Nvidia, trying to move its graphics chips into the supercomputing market, has found a niche helping engineers build brain-like systems called neural networks.

For years, the company has advocated the idea of offloading processing tasks from general-purposes central processing units (CPUs) to its own graphics processing units (GPUs). That approach has won over some researchers and companies involved with neural networks, which reproduce some of the electrical behavior of real-world nerve cells inside a computer.

Neurons in the real world work by sending electrical signals around the brain, but much of the actual functioning of the brain remains a mystery. … Read more

Chinese supercomputer tops the charts -- two years early

Performing more than 33 quadrillion calculations per second, a new Chinese supercomputer called Tianhe-2 arrived two years earlier than expected to claim the top spot in a list of the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world.

The Top500 list, updated twice a year at the International Supercomputing Conference, measures performance for mammoth systems typically used for jobs like modeling nuclear weapons explosions and forecasting global climate changes. And the Chinese machine, at the National University of Defense Technology, is more mammoth than most.

The Tianhe-2 has 32,000 Xeon processors boosted by 48,000 Xeon Phi accelerator processors for … Read more

IBM packs 128TB of flash into brain-simulating supercomputer

Drawing from engineering ideas that are revamping personal computers, IBM and two Swiss universities are using flash memory to improve performance of a supercomputer designed to simulate an actual mouse brain.

But there's a lot more flash memory than you'll find in the latest laptop.

A PC's solid-state drive may come with something like 128GB to 512GB of flash memory. The mouse-brain project's specially upgraded version of a Blue Gene/Q supercomputer has 250 to 1,000 times as much flash memory -- 128 terabytes.

The supercomputer project, in conjunction with the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de … Read more

Lenovo chief sees servers, storage as key to future

Lenovo chief Yang Yuanqing says his company will be exploiting growth opportunities in servers, storage, and the smartphone industry over the next year.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal published Thursday, Yang said storage and server solutions are an area that Lenovo wants to expand and develop. In addition, if acquisition opportunities appear, the PC maker will take them.

The Lenovo chief believes there is still a market for PCs, although a number of analysts and research firms disagree. In the latest round of ITC figures, global PC shipments were estimated to have plunged 14 percent year over … Read more

JPMorgan cuts 2013 forecast for IT spending

IT spending is likely to be even lower this year than initially expected but should start to revive in 2014, according to JPMorgan Chase.

An new estimate in a report released Thursday by JPMorgan Chase analyst Mark Moskowitz calls for growth in IT spending of just 0.6 percent this year. That's down from the previous forecast of 1.2 percent.

Moskowitz expects businesses to spend less on IT hardware, which accounts for a huge part of the lower estimate. Companies have been shifting more of their cash away from traditional computers toward mobile devices.

Moskowitz now expects spending … Read more

Icahn to limit Dell stake but can talk with other investors

Activist investor Carl Icahn has agreed to limit his stake in Dell but will be allowed to speak with other investors about a bid to buy the PC maker.

In a filing today with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Dell said that its special committee has reached an agreement with Icahn. The agreement bars Icahn from buying more than 10 percent of Dell's shares or partnering with other shareholders to own more than 15 percent of Dell. However, as part of the pact, Icahn has been granted a limited waiver that allows him to "engage" with other … Read more

HP's new Project Moonshot runs on Intel's Atom -- for now

Hewlett-Packard today launched its Moonshot server line with an Intel-based Atom system -- and more chipsets planned in the future. The promise: HP will create Moonshot hyperscale, software-defined servers for custom workloads.

The bet for HP is that it can launch new Moonshot systems at three times the product cycle of traditional servers. For HP, Moonshot represents the company's ability to innovate, remain a server leader, and keep up with cloud customers, which are increasingly building their own gear.

HP CEO Meg Whitman started today's Webcast by talking "brontobytes of information" and by arguing that the … Read more

Former supercomputer king Roadrunner to shut down today

Four years ago, Roadrunner was the world's fastest supercomputer. But it has lost a step on today's speed leaders and will be shut down today in preparation for dismantling.

Created in 2008 to monitor the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, the IBM supercomputer was the first system to break the petaflop barrier, hitting 1.026 petaflops shortly after its installation at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. (1 petaflop is equal to a quadrillion, or one thousand trillion, calculations per second.) It would ultimately sit atop of the Top500 supercomputers list three times.

In its five years of operation, … Read more