The Top 500 Super Ranking Now Counts Watts as Well as Flops
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The 31st edition of the semi-annual Top 500 listing of supercomputers in the world was announced last week at the International Supercomputing Conference 2008 event in Dresden, Germany, and the list will be noteworthy for two reasons. First, this will be the first time that a supercomputer of any make, vendor, or architecture has broken through the petaflops performance barrier, a feat accomplished by the 'Roadrunner' hybrid Opteron-Cell machine created for the U.S. government's Los Alamos National Laboratory by IBM. And second, and perhaps foremost, this will be the first ranking where watts are being counted for big machines in a manner that is as consistent as the Linpack Fortran benchmark that is the touchstone for performance. READ MORE >

Red Hat Launches oVirt Embedded KVM Hypervisor Project
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

There's more than one way to make money from operating systems. Considering that hypervisors are really a kind of primitive operating system (or software-embodied hardware, if you want to hurt your head thinking about it too much) and that there is money to be made here, you can bet that most commercial operating system suppliers are trying to dice and slice their operating systems and hypervisors in as many ways as possible in an effort to address many different scenarios and thereby extract the most dough from the most IT shops. READ MORE >

openSUSE 11.0 Out the Door and On the Street
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you want to get a sneak peek at some of the features that will eventually be delivered as part of Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 variants for servers and PCs, you can now get it from the openSUSE project, the development effort that creates the code that eventually makes its way into the commercialized SLES and SLED releases. That's because openSUSE 11.0 is now available. READ MORE >

As I See It: Flights of Fancy
by Victor Rozek

On December 7, 2005, the Air Force released its new mission statement: 'The Mission of the United States Air Force is to deliver sovereign options for the defense of the United States of America and its global interests--to fly and fight in air, space, and cyberspace.' Besides noting that the Air Force should expand its mission to include hiring an English major to fix that tortured bit of writing, it is worth observing that the Air Force has taken an active interest in cyberspace. READ MORE >