Sun Gets Serious (Finally) About Supercomputing
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

When Sun's top brass brought Andy Bechtolsheim, its former chief technology officer and the first employee hired by the company's founders, back to the company in February 2004, they got a lot more than a techie who knows about chips, servers, and operating systems. They also got one of the smartest people in the world when it comes to networking technology, and someone who was probably going to give the big server makers a run for the money in the media and high performance computing space with his little company, Kealia. This week at the International Supercomputing Conference 2007 show in Dresden, Germany, we got a peek at exactly what Bechtolsheim was working on at Kealia. 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 is going on in Dresden, Germany, this week, 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 >

HP Promotes Transitive Tool to Port Solaris Apps to Integrity Servers
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

It was definitely only a matter of time before Hewlett-Packard or Intel ponied up the development cash to get Transitive to create a variant of its QuickTransit emulation environment that would allow Solaris applications running on Sparc server platforms to run in emulated mode on Itanium-based servers running Linux. HP announced that it was working with Transitive to create such a product at its Technology Forum meeting for customers and partners in Las Vegas last week. READ MORE >

As I See It: Dare to Be Rich
by Victor Rozek

Let me preface this by saying that what I'm suggesting may be illegal. Which is not to say that there aren't a lot of wealthy people and corporations doing it. It's called sheltering income and those who shelter theirs do so because they can; and they can because wealth provides them with a level of immunity from the laws they find restrictive-an exemption not generally available to toi and moi. So if you want to join the chorus singing Gimme Shelter, it may be necessary to adopt the same swagger and contempt for equity exhibited by the ruling class. In other words: Dare to be rich. There's no reason why IT professionals shouldn't keep a little more of what they earn. READ MORE >