16th November 2009 Archive

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Top 500 supers - rise of the Linux quad-cores

SC09 Jaguar munches Roadrunner

Looking at the semi-annual Top 500 list of supercomputers, you would never know the world was battling recession. Supercomputer centers keep chucking out old tech and rolling in new tech at the same feverish pace. The fall edition of the list was announced this morning at the SC09 supercomputing trade show in Portland, Oregon …

Enterprise 16 Nov 05:02
Appro: HPC's all about the GPUs

SC09 Magny-Cours as AMD 'comeback kid'

In the supercomputer racket, you can be a niche player, a volume server maker with some HPC smarts, or a carcass that one of the other two feasts on. As a boutique supplier of high performance parallel clusters, Appro International has to use every weapon it can get its hands on to distinguish itself from IBM, Cray, and …

Enterprise 16 Nov 05:02
Cisco and the war for, um, hosted email

Anything GooIBMsoft can do...

Cisco Systems tossed itself into an increasingly contentious market last week with the debut of its very own hosted email service. Yes, contentious. Business email, so it seems, hasn't been interesting in an extremely long time. Like breathing — you rarely notice it unless it stops. But now its become a veritable clash of the …

Software & Security 16 Nov 06:02
Droboman expects a 3TB drive from somewhere soon

Western Digital the likeliest suspect

Dr Geoff Barrall, founder and CEO of Drobo gave out his opinion in London last week that there should be a 3TB drive for Drobos by April next year. He didn't name the supplier, but Drobo does use Western Digital drives, so this 3TB drive could be a black one. Currently Western Digital offers a 2TB Caviar Black 3.5-inch SATA …

Enterprise 16 Nov 10:10
US boffins build, test working 2-qubit quantum processor

Beryllium ions used in place of undead cats

Federal boffins in America say they have built the first computer processing device able to handle quantum-mechanical numbers expressed as "qubits". Whereas a regular bit is either 1 or 0, a qubit can be 1, 0 or some of both just as a metaphorical cat in a box may be dead, alive or in a mysterious semi-undead waveform zombie …

Enterprise 16 Nov 10:46
Canon loads up on Oce in €730m deal

Printer vendors ink takeover

Canon is buying Dutch printer vendor Oce for €730m, in a move that could herald further consolidation in the imaging market. The Japanese giant will launch a tender offer for the Dutch firm's shares, in a deal which is being seen as broadening Canon's footprint in the higher end production printing market, and targeting fellow …

IT Channel 16 Nov 12:45
HP double stuffs Nehalem blades

SC09 Skinless Opteron iron for HPC

Hewlett-Packard may not dominate the HPC headlines, but it does serve up a lot of iron that runs HPC applications. And today, at the SC09 supercomputing show in Portland, Oregon, HP is adding two new servers to its ProLiant portfolio aimed specifically at the cluster crowd. The company is also touting its StorageWorks X9000 …

Enterprise 16 Nov 13:02
The biggest flash drive in the world

An almighty tower of SSD power

ViON have produced a 100TB DRAM solid state drive, which they claim to be the largest flash memory-based storage box in the world. The HyperStor-6200 uses both Hitachi Data Systems and Texas Memory Systems technology - think RamSan 6200 - and provides five million I/Os per second (IOPS) with 60GB/sec bandwidth. It is a monster …

Enterprise 16 Nov 13:18