Blade Servers Make It to the Top HPC Sites
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The 30th edition of the semi-annual Top 500 listing of supercomputers in the world was announced just after The Linux Beacon went on holiday, during the Supercomputing Conference 2007 in Reno, Nevada. And if Moore's Law is a constant in the IT racket, so is the desire by the largest supercomputer facilities in the world to consume ever more large aggregations of computing power. The availability of multicore X64 processors that stay within a fixed thermal envelope coupled with a more or less standard Linux application environment and cheap InfiniBand interconnect and even cheaper Gigabit Ethernet links between nodes is making high performance computing cheaper than ever before. READ MORE >

Red Hat and Platform Computing Partner for Supercomputing
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Platform Computing, one of the pioneers of grid computing for supercomputing environments, and Red Hat, a pioneer in commercially supported Linux distributions and the revenue and market share leader for commercial Linux for a decade, have teamed up to bundle and promote their respective products among the high performance computing centers of the world. Red Hat and Platform Computing have been working together since the latter company rolled together a bunch of open source tools into an integrated stack back in July 2006, called the Open Cluster Stack. READ MORE >

HP Closes Out Fiscal 2007 with a Strong Finish
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

You can really tell that Hewlett-Packard is as much in the consumer IT market as it is a seller of commercial IT products, and it is also pretty obvious that HP does not have a strong dependency on the financial services industry. These facts are among the reasons why HP was able to close out its fourth quarter, ended October 31, with sales up 15 percent to $28.3 billion. Tight cost controls and lower component costs helped HP bring $2.16 billion to the bottom line, up 21.7 percent from last year's fourth quarter. READ MORE >

Be My Guest
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Like most people who have been following the server racket for a long time, I have been singing the praises of server virtualization as a means to make servers more efficient and thereby help companies not only get more for their money, but hopefully--if not now, then in future years--to actually save some money that they can spend on other things. While virtualization is a great advancement in server technology, it is breaking down a lot of barriers even as it erects virtual ones inside servers of all stripes and sizes. READ MORE >