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.
With global networks carrying complex time-sensitive data, the speed of light is actually becoming a significant source of latency, researchers have found.
IBM researchers have made a breakthrough in using pulses of light to accelerate data transfer between chips, something they say could boost the performance of supercomputers by more than a thousand times.
There is an international race to build an exascale supercomputer, and one of the people leading it is Peter Beckman, a top computer scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory.
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.
Microsoft today released an updated version of its Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 that can tap into compute resources throughout an enterprise as well as a cloud computing system.
While chip manufacturers continue to make their processors ever more powerful, at least one customer has found it useful to slow these chips down, at least long enough to keep them running when the data center air conditioning falters.
Amazon Web Services says its latest cluster computing service, which it announced Tuesday, can provide the same results as custom-built infrastructures for high-performance applications at organizations that don't want to build their own.
Supercomputers that mix CPUs with graphics processors made their mark on the Green500 list of top energy-efficient supercomputers released on Wednesday.