Amazon Web Services (AWS) wants to attract more high-performance computing users to its cloud and has launched a public beta of Cluster Compute Eight Extra Large, its most powerful cloud service yet.
Extending its expertise in the field of high performance computing (HPC), IBM is acquiring cluster computing software vendor Platform Computing, the companies announced Tuesday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
A Japanese computer has taken first place on the Top 500 supercomputer list, ending China's reign at the top after just six months. At 8.16 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point calculations per second), the K computer is more powerful than the next five systems combined.
IBM hopes to help companies more efficiently use their high-performance computing resources with new software that links separate pools of resources into a single private cloud.
Wrapping up a three-day run on the Jeopardy game show, IBM's Watson computer has beaten two former champions in a historic match of man versus machine.
When it comes tackling a challenge as tough as answering a human question, the best computational approach may be to break the job down into multiple parts and run them all in parallel, IBM is betting.
Addressing the growing market for tools that handle very large data sets, Microsoft has released a beta set of technologies, called Dryad, to manage and analyze large amounts of information across a cluster of Windows Servers.
While a number of small companies have been ramping up support for a file system called Lustre that Oracle acquired in its Sun Microsystems purchase earlier this year, Oracle itself has no plans to abandon the technology, a company executive told the IDG News Service in an interview.
The global race for supercomputing power continues unabated: Germany's Bavarian Academy of Science has announced that it has contracted IBM to build a supercomputer that, when completed in 2012, will be able to execute up to 3 petaflops, potentially making it the world's most powerful supercomputer.
While China can take pride in topping the list of the world's most powerful supercomputers, IBM has been given another recognition: building the world's most energy-efficient supercomputer.
Like Hollywood's Academy Awards, the Top500 list of supercomputers is dutifully watched by high-performance computing (HPC) participants and observers, even as they vocally doubt its fidelity to excellence.
When it comes to power-efficient computing, CPUs are weighed down by too many legacy features to outperform GPUs (graphics processing units) in executing common tasks in parallel, said the chief scientist for the GPU vendor Nvidia.
A new supercomputer installation in China has rocketed to the top of the twice-annual ranking of the world's most powerful supercomputers.
Disregarding the supercomputing community's insatiable thirst for FLOPS (floating point operations per second), the Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins University is configuring its new machine to achieve the maximum number of IOPS (I/O operations per second) instead.
Despite reassurances from Oracle, advocates of yet another ex-Sun Microsystems technology are voicing concern about the future of their software. In this latest case, the technology is Lustre, a file system widely used across the supercomputing community.