Beep, Beep: Roadrunner Linux Super Breaks the Petaflops Barrier
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

This week, the International Supercomputing Conference 2008, one of the two big events dedicated to high performance computing, is underway with week in Dresden, Germany, and the star of that show will be a massively parallel, hybrid supercomputer called Roadrunner, created by IBM for Los Alamos National Laboratory, that has officially broken through the 1 petaflops peak performance barrier. Beep, beep! READ MORE >

AMD Offers Clock Cranks on Barcelona Opterons
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

OK, so last week, when I said that Advanced Micro Devices had finally finished getting its quad-core Rev F lineup of processors into the field with the delivery of the 'Budapest' Opteron 1300 series of chips for single-socket workstations and servers, you all knew I was talking about finished at the socket level, right? I certainly didn't want to give the impression that there would be no more clock speed bumps in the quad-core Opteron lineup. READ MORE >

The World Can't Get Enough Disk Array Capacity
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

While processors have hit a gigahertz wall somewhere around 3, 4, or 5 gigahertz, depending on the chip architecture, forcing chip makers to shift the use of Moore's Law advances in chip manufacturing to multicore devices to pack more capacity into a single slice of silicon, disk makers have not, thus far, hit a capacity wall on drives. And as far as anyone can tell, the appetite for gigabytes just keeps on growing and growing. It is really quite astounding, especially when you consider the amount of garbage that must be stored on computers the world over. READ MORE >

Stratus Builds Its First HA Clustering Product Atop Xen
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The age of virtualized servers is going to have some intended side effects on the server racket, and one of them is high availability clustering that is easier to use, more flexible in its deployment, and less costly than more tradition server clustering methods. While Stratus Technologies is one of the original upstarts of fault tolerant computing (along with Tandem, now a division of Hewlett-Packard), the company knows a broader HA opportunity when it sees it. And that is what the Avance virtualization-driven HA software product line announced this week is all about. READ MORE >