Digital and Kryotech have released a 767MHz Alpha they call the Personal Supercomputer. 4MB of L3 cache and it runs at -40C! Starting at over US$20,000 for the NT-based model, they're not cheap, but I bet they fly, especially in terms of FPU!

Raymond Fellers writes "A few months ago, Intel released the Math Kernel Library which provide level 1,2,&3 BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines) and FFTs tuned for Pentium Pros and IIs. Unfortunately, the MKL was only available for Windows. Recently, a group of Intel employees working on the ASCI Red supercomputer released a Linux version of the MKL. " You can read more here.

Zooko wrote in with this story where you can read about how universities are deciding to use Beowulf clusters instead of supercomputers. The Beowulf standard parts in parallel to provide faster, cheaper computing without all the crazy engineering that goes into a high end supercomputer.

NEC will be rolling out a new supercomputer, one of the few of the shrinking market, within the next few days. It's quite interesting to read some of the press releases about these supercomputers. NEC will be rolling out a new terraflops machine for use in climate and natural disaster modeling. Recently, the US Department of Energy announced that they will be buying more supercomputers as well-to model atomic bombs. Ironic, isn't it?

The U.S Department of Energy will launch a project called "Pathforward" this month. The project aims to build a 30 terraflop supercomputer by the year 2001. The U.S DOE will buy 2 IBM PowerPC-based supercomputers with 4096 processors in late '98 or early '99 and will buy a second 3 terraflop based computer from Cray Research Inc. later that year.

Hewlett-Packard is the main contractor in charge of designing externalconnect links so that the computers may be clustered efficiently (more than 6.4GB/sec, minimal latency)