Solaris Conversion Rate: Sun Sheds Some Light
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Last week, when Sun Microsystems went through its financial report for its first quarter of fiscal 2008 ended September 30, Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's president and chief executive officer, said in a conference call with Wall Street analysts that the company has over 2 million processor sockets globally with paid-for support for the Solaris 10 operating system. This is the first time that Sun has given any hard numbers that allow us to reckon a conversion rate from Solaris 10 freebie shipments to Solaris 10 paying customers. READ MORE >

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 this week at 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 >

Intel Announces First "Penryn" Xeon Processors
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Chip maker Intel is timing the launch of its 'Penryn' family of 45 nanometer quad-core Xeon processors to coincide with the Supercomputing Conference 2007 high performance computing event being held this week in Reno, Nevada, as a means of highlighting the performance and performance per watt advantages its new 'Harpertown' Xeon 5400s can offer to HPC customers. But the chips will plug into other commercial two-socket servers and workstations, too, and they will put that much more pressure on Advanced Micro Devices and its 'Barcelona' quad-core X64 chips. READ MORE >

The Blue Cloud Is IBM's Commercial Cloud Computing
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Like other server makers, IBM has conflicting desires to both embrace and to ignore the what seems inevitable advance from proprietary computing--under both senses of the word proprietary--to open, on-demand, utility-style computing. Because companies still like to own their computing infrastructure but nonetheless want to experiment with new architectures, IBM this week is rolling out a new product called the Blue Cloud, which lets companies build their own utilities--often called 'clouds' in deference to the Internet's old nickname, the Big Gray Cloud--using similar technology deployed by Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and similar Internet powerhouses. READ MORE >