kwertii writes "IBM CEO Samuel J. Palmisano announced a sweeping new business strategy yesterday, pledging $10,000,000,000 towards redefining computing as a metered utility. Corporate customers would have on-demand access to supercomputer-level resources, and would pay only for time actually used. The $10 billion is slated for acquisitions and research to put the supporting infrastructure in place. Will this model revolutionize the way companies compute, or is this plan doomed to be another PCjr?"

joestar writes "According to their website, Mandrake and partners (Bull, INPG/INRIA...) have launched an 'easy-to-deploy easy-to-use Linux Clustering solution,' that has already been tested on a 40-node cluster. Of course, it's published under the GPL, comes with parallel applications, and is available for download as an ISO. It seems the project is financed by French government. It's great because I've always dreamed of having my own supercomputer at home."

Uhh_Duh writes "news.com is reporting that Linux will be the main OS in the Blue Gene - IBM's $100m supercomputer project. The Blue Gene will contain 65,000 processors and 16 trillion bytes of memory." Wow. That's a lot of nuclear weapons simulations.

LadyCatra writes "A serious shortage of world-class computing power in Canada prompted University of Alberta scientists to create the next best thing -- a countrywide, virtual supercomputer. On Nov. 4, thousands of computers from research centres across the country will be strung together by a U of A effort to create the most powerful computer in this country. The full story is here"

An anonymous reader writes "LANL will be receiving a 1024 node (2048 processor) LinuxBIOS/BProc based supercomputer late this year. The story is at this location. This system is unique in Linux cluster terms due to no disks on compute nodes, using LinuxBIOS and Beoboot to accomplish booting, and BProc for job startup and management. It is officially known as the Science Appliance, but is affectionately known as Pink to the team that is building much of it."

Neil Blender writes "From this article: "Astronomers have fashioned an Earth-sized virtual radio telescope that can distinguish celestial features 3,000 times smaller than the those observed by the Hubble Space Telescope. The device, which uses atomic clocks and a custom supercomputer to link together radio dishes on three continents, is the most powerful radio observatory ever, according to scientists." Some parts of the custom supercomputer use linux and IDE RAID."

dnxthx writes "According to this ZDNet article the design of the Playstation 3 chip is nearly complete. The PS3 chip will have near "supercomputer capabilities" --- including 1 TFLOP. Reportedly, this chip is being engineered with Linux in mind."

sean23007 writes "New Scientist posts an article about an innovative new method of controlling P2P traffic to maximize speed over a very large network. The idea, thought up by researchers at Princeton, Berkeley, AT&T, and Cisco, involves sending random "walkers" around the network, looking for a particular file, which would theoretically yield much better search speed than such other networks as Gnutella. They claim this could result in a network very capable of facilitating a massive distributed supercomputer."

Junky191 writes: "Just came across an informational page for the Earth Simulator computer, which provides nice graphics of the layout of the machine and its support structure, as well as details about exactly what types of problems it solves. Fascinating for the engineering problems tackled- how would you organize a 5,120 processor system capable of 40Tflops, and of course don't forget about the 10TB of shared memory." Take note -- donour writes: "well, the new list of supercomputer rankings is up today. I have to say that the Earth Simulator is quite impressive, from both a performance and architectural standpoint."

anzha writes "It seems Cray is alive and kicking at least. They might even be making a come back after its very rough time as a part of SGI. The big news? Cray seems to have won the Red Storm contract - Sandia's newest supercomputer procurement - from Sandia National Labs. Check out the press release here. I'd say that this is probably an SV2, but the press release is a bit scant on details."

guttentag writes "According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Bush's Homeland Security plan calls for transferring $1.2 billion of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's $1.5 billion budget to a new Department of Homeland Security under Tom Ridge. However, the plan transfers only 4 percent of the lab's employees. Ridge's explanation of the numbers: "I cannot give you the kind of explanation you need to deal with that imbalance." LLNL funded and houses the ASCI White supercomputer, among other cool projects." While Livermore has an impressive research record, we would miss most the laser lab from Tron.

wildsurf writes "A post in sci.energy points to recent confirmation of the stable existence of N60 , through supercomputer simulation. Large-scale synthesis of this material could form the basis for tremendously powerful rocket fuel. Here is an in-depth article on the subject. What would you do with a few million liters of this stuff?"

claylikethemud writes "The New York Times reports that Japan has built the world's most powerful supercomputer from "640 specialized nodes that are in turn composed of 5,104" NEC processors. The machine boasts the computing power equivalent to the 20 fastest American supercomputers combined, and with a top speed of 35.6 teraflops, outpaces the next fastest machine, the ASCI White Pacific, by more than factor of five. Applications include climate modeling, global warming prediction, and other non-weapons research."

An anonymous reader wrote in to say "Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (US DOE) signed a $24.5 million dollar contract with HP for a Linux supercomputer. This will be one of the top ten fastest computers in the world. Some cool features: 8.3 Trillion Floating Point Operations per Second, 1.8 Terabytes of RAM, 170 Terabytes of disk, (including a 53 TB SAN), and 1400 Intel McKinley and Madison Processors. Nice quote: 'Today's announcement shows how HP has worked to help accelerate the shift from proprietary platforms to open architectures, which provide increased scalability, speed and functionality at a lower cost,' said Rich DeMillo, vice president and chief technology officer at HP. Read Details of the announcement here or here."

totallygeek writes "Redefining the term vaporware, research scientists at Lost Alamos and Lawrence Livermore Labs detonated two computer simulations. ASCI White, the world's fastest supercomputer, ran the simulations of nuclear explosions. Scientists can now study nuclear weapon replacement components without violating the nuclear test ban, in effect since 1992. Each simulation used more than 6.6 million CPU hours, which would take home machines 1000 years to complete. The data for each experiment was equivalent to 35 times the information available in the Library of Congress. ASCI White currently operates at 12 teraflops, but by early next year, Los Alamos expects to operate at 30 teraflops. The seven month research project ended last Friday, and now the system is ready for use, after its sucessful testing."

jhiv writes: "The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) reports that 'Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories have completed the first full-system three-dimensional simulations of a nuclear weapon's explosion'. The simulations are two of the largest computer simulations ever attempted, each taking weeks to complete on the ASCI White supercomputer. The Los Alamos team used the ASCI Blue Mountain supercomputer to visualize the results. Additional coverage can be found in this story in the Albuquerque Journal."

Cameron asks: "Has anyone tried to make a Linux cluster on a typical company/school network? I am trying to make a Linux cluster by taking bootable CDs and putting them in computers on an existing network. Red Hat (or another distro if it's better suited) would boot and run off the CD without needing any (or much) HD space. This way the computers aren't changed and I can have a virtual supercomputer for a while. Mmm 18Ghz. Anyway has anyone tried this before? Also I'd appreciate any suggestions on which distro to use and what cluster software/daemons I'd need. i.e. Beowolf or something like it." While an interesting approach to clustering, unless each node has quite a bit of RAM, I would think that you might need a marginal swap partition. What problems do you see with this idea, and would they be surmountable? Might such an idea be useful for quickly converting a computer lab to a cluster when it's not being used for other things?

MrZeebo writes "According to a story on Yahoo! News, Bush has finally decided to lift the Cold War-era restrictions on how fast an exported computer can be. Now, computers as fast as 195,000 MTOPS (up from 85,000 MTOPS) can be exported to countries such as Russia, China, and Pakistan."

Nate LaCourse writes: "Real good one from Cringely this month. It's on building his own supercomputer, but with some twists." You'll probably also want to check out the KLAT2 homepage to learn more about their Flat Neighborhood Network. And since KLAT2 has been around for nearly a year (check out the poster on this page!), perhaps a 3rd generation is in the works?

onyxcide writes: "Envision is running a quick article on a new national grid of computing resources called TeraGrid. Half a petabyte of disk storage, 40-gigabyte-per-second national optical backbone, and 13 teraflops of computing power will make up this monster. It will allow "lavish amounts of online data to be continually available for instantaneous analysis, data mining, and knowlege synthesis." There's another article in the same magazine here: Transforming Research with High-Performance Grid Computing" LighthouseJ adds some details: "C|Net's news.com has a story about a new Compaq supercomputer named Terascale. It uses 3,000 Alpha EV68 processors distributed over 750 servers using networking systems from Quadrics. They say it can perform as fast as 10,000 desktop PC's combined in one second. The massive computer will make it's official debut on Monday at the Supercomputing Center in Pittsburgh PA."