High performance - News, Features, and Slideshows

News

• Windows 10, Chrome OS battle royale to benefit PCs this year

  Laptops with Microsoft's Windows 10 will be in a heavyweight bout with Chromebooks for market dominance later this year, but no matter who wins, PC shipments will benefit from the clash.

• Weather forecasting made (slightly) easier with updated NOAA system

  To better anticipate the next Sandy-size hurricane, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is upgrading the supercomputers it uses for predicting the weather.

• 7 inter-related habits driving high performance

  Many Australian companies are looking for quick fixes and easy answers to ride out difficult economic times, but often don’t realise performance comes down to practicing what they preach.
  

• Top500 Supercomputer race loses momentum

  Once a seething cauldron of competition, the twice-yearly Top500 listing of the world's most powerful supercomputers has grown nearly stagnant of late.

• Fujitsu to design Japanese exascale supercomputer

  Japan has chosen Fujitsu to help it regain the top spot in the global supercomputer race with an exascale machine, which at 1000 petaflops would be about 30 times faster than the leading supercomputer today.

• Cray aims to stay in big leagues with XC40 supercomputers

  Cray has added more horsepower to its latest supercomputer, the XC40, and already has scored some big-time customers.

• Beyond FLOPS: The co-evolving world of computer benchmarking

  It used to be simple: Multiply the microprocessor's clock rate by four, and you could measure a computer's computational power in megaFLOPS (millions of floating point operations per second) or gigaFLOPS (billions of FLOPS.)

• Oracle gives Exadata some backward compatibility

  Oracle has made it possible to run a much older but still widely used version of its database software on Exadata, in a move that could make heretofore reluctant buyers pull the trigger on a purchase of the data-processing appliance.

• Atos succeeds in bid to buy Bull, will boost security and cloud offerings

  Atos's offer to acquire servers and services specialist Bull has been approved, making it possible for the company to beef up its security and cloud computing offerings.

• Fujitsu guns for faster supercomputers with new chip

  The world's fastest computer is facing a challenge from Fujitsu, which is developing a new high-performance chip that could go into supercomputers up to three times faster.

• State Department computer crash slows visa, passport applications worldwide

  The U.S. State Department's main computer system for processing passport and visa applications crashed earlier this week leading to global delays for travel documents.

• US chases supercomputing crown with multipetaflop Trinity system

  Stepping up its efforts to regain supercomputing dominance from China, the U.S. within the next two years will activate what could be one of the world's fastest computers.

• IBM tries to forecast and control Beijing's air pollution

  China's nagging pollution problems could start to abate with the help of an IBM project that seeks to predict and control the air quality in Beijing, using new computing technologies.

• ISC: Cray makes Lustre palatable for storage administrators

  Supercomputer vendor Cray is trying to make the Lustre file system easier to work with, allowing users to copy material from the file system into a multilayered storage archiving system.

• SC500: China wins a slowing supercomputer race

  China continues to dominate the high end of the Top500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers, even as the growth of the computing power on the list seems to be stagnating.