Red Hat Starts Fiscal 2008 with Modest Profit, Big Revenue Growth
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

One of the interesting things about being an open source software company that sells services for products is that you don't really have to worry about product upgrade cycles in the same way that proprietary software makers have to. Nothing demonstrates how open source companies like Red Hat are perhaps better suited to the unpredictable nature of software development than its first quarter of fiscal 2008, where the company posted $118.9 million, up 42 percent. READ MORE >

Top 500 Supers: Moore's Law Is Alive and Well
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Call it a rite of summer. The International Supercomputing Conference was going on in Dresden, Germany, as we were publishing the prior edition of this newsletter, and each year this is when the first of the Top 500 supercomputer lists ranking the most powerful number-crunchers in the world comes out. (In the fall, it is the Supercomputing event in Silicon Gulch that has the second ranking.) The current Top 500 ranking shows a number of things: multicore X64 processors are popular, Linux is king in HPC, and Moore's Law is alive and well when it comes to supercomputers, thanks in large part to high-speed and affordable interconnection electronics. READ MORE >

IBM to Break Petaflops Barrier with Blue Gene/P
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The race is on to build the first supercomputer that can break 1 petaflops of aggregate number-crunching power, and IBM is hoping to be the first company to do it with its future Blue Gene/P massively parallel supercomputer. Blue Gene was conceived in 1999 by IBM Research as a project to test out a minimalist, vastly expansive parallel supercomputer design that would gang up a very large number of fairly simple dual-core PowerPC processors to create an energy efficient Linux box capable of breaking through the 1 petaflops barrier using as many as 1 million processors. READ MORE >

As I See It: The All-American Exhausting Vacation
by Victor Rozek

If you can overlook the mosquitos and the natural grandeur, spending a day in Yosemite is a lot like spending a day at Disney's It's a Small World attraction. In both locations you will find crowds, long lines, and examples of people who wear exotic clothing and don't speak English. They come from all points of the compass, speaking a Babel of languages from melodic to staccato, and although their history and customs are as varied as wild flowers, they have at least one thing in common: They get more vacation time than the locals. READ MORE >