supercomputing

Updated 3:12 p.m. to correct the number of the highest ranking Windows cluster

While Windows is ubiquitous on the desktop and well represented in the server racks, until recently it has been nearly absent from the world's largest supercomputers.

Starting several years ago, though, Microsoft made a concerted effort at this part of the market, creating a separate version of Windows solely for computing clusters.

The first big fruits of that effort were evidenced in this year's top 500 list of the world's biggest supercomputers. Five of those on the list were Windows clusters, including … Read more

Good news for green tech: The fastest supercomputer in the world is also one of the most energy efficient. That's according to the Top500 supercomputers list, to be released Wednesday at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany.

Twice yearly, the list measures the 500 most powerful computer systems available commercially. This year, the 31st time the list has been put together, the honor of top supercomputer goes to IBM's Roadrunner, which is housed at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory. It's the first system to reach 1.026 petaflops (1 petaflop … Read more

NASA, Intel, and SGI announced today that they are collaborating on a groundbreaking initiative that promises to vastly improve performance of the space agency's supercomputer operations, "enabling them to push the limits of scientific discovery."

Under a joint project dubbed "Pleiades," the three partners plan to develop a modeling and simulation system of unprecedented speed and capacity in the nation's space program. Specifically, they hope to produce computational performance of 1 petaflop (a quadrillion operations per second) by 2009 and 10 petaflops by 2012.

What does that mean, exactly? A task that would take … Read more

Purdue University on Monday plans to install a new supercomputer on its campus in a single day, in an effort it's calling an "electronic barn-raising."

Approximately 200 employees will help build the machine, which will be the size of a semi trailer and is expected to have a peak performance of more than 60 teraflops, which means it would be able to perform more than 60 trillion operations in one second, according to a Purdue press release.

Once it's completed, Purdue's supercomputer still won't top the list of the 500 fastest supercomputers, though the … Read more

Yahoo announced Monday that it has joined forces with the Pune, India-based Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) in order to support research in cloud computing, a way to outsource hardware and software to service providers rather than host it locally. Under the terms of the agreement, researchers will be able to use the EKA, a supercomputer owned by CRL that contains 28 terabytes of memory, 14,400 processors, 140 terabytes of disks, and a peak performance of 180 trillion calculations per second.

According to CRL, EKA is the world's fourth fastest supercomputer.

"We are excited to partner with Yahoo … Read more

Astronomers are using the world's largest supercomputers to transform theories and formulas into animated 3D simulations of black holes colliding, stars being born, and gamma-ray bursts blowing everything else away.

Check out the story and image gallery at Popsci.com: "Cutting edge visions of cosmic extremes"

At one time, Linux Networx was one of the industry's premier open-source players. I personally kicked the tires on joining and loved the innovative work it was doing. Yesterday the company, which has struggled the past few years through painful venture funding rounds and increased industry competition, tied the knot with SGI.

Or, rather, its assets did. Not much was left to sell to SGI

It's a rough business. Linux Networx used to have 15 supercomputers to its credit (on the list of Top 500 Supercomputers) but now has nine. It's the nature of the beast: you'… Read more

MENLO PARK, Calif.--It got delayed a few months, but a new, somewhat unusual supercomputer from Sun Microsystems will get formally unveiled next week.

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas will dedicate a Constellation System from Sun on February 22, said John Fowler, executive vice president of systems at Sun. He was speaking at the company's global media summit here Wednesday. (Technically, the computer started running earlier this month: the dedication is sort of like the official coming-out party.) After TACC, Sun hopes to start selling Constellations to more customers.

The linchpin of Constellation … Read more

From a marketing perspective, multicore processors are an easy sell. Two brains are better than one. Four brains are better than two. You get the idea.

The challenge is that a whole lot of computer software has been designed to take advantage of ever-faster brains, not a computer packed full of them. It's a particular challenge for desktop and mobile computers. On the server and supercomputing side, the notion of parallel computing has been around for some time.

In the PC world, software makers have been scrambling to find new ways of thinking as Moore's law is quickly … Read more