Stories about: Oak Ridge National Laboratory

About five months after IBM's Roadrunner supercomputer became the fastest computer in the world, Cray Inc.'s XT Jaguar could dethrone it next week.

To try to assess global warming's impact on the environment and see if the world faces an abrupt climate change, Zhengyu Liu, director of the Center for Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, is turning to supercomputing technology.

For years, the name of the game in supercomputing has been raw speed, with hardware and software designers striving to boost the number of instructions per second -- FLOPS -- that could be crunched. Gigaflops computers gave way to teraflops machines, which are now yielding to petaflops models -- those able to execute 1 quadrillion computations per second.

The U.S. government is planning to spend hundreds of millions of dollars over the next several years to develop huge supercomputers with power beyond anything available today. The aim is to address the most challenging problems facing science, as well national security and industry.

IBM made a move to get ahead of rival Hewlett-Packard in the high-performance computing market Tuesday, announcing a partnership with semiconductor maker ClearSpeed Technology.

After doing research for years using computer clusters, Iowa State University has a high-performance supercomputer running to decipher the corn genome. Meanwhile, Georgia Institute of Technology deepened its high-performance computing relationship with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).

Fujitsu next month will launch a new line of multiprocessor servers based on Intel's Itanium 2 processor, according to sources familiar with the company's plans. The new line, called PrimeQuest, will be unveiled at a press conference in San Francisco currently scheduled for April 5, the sources said.

A consortium of US universities and businesses on Wednesday unveiled a five-year, US$40 million research project to develop a system that uses small, short-range radar devices to dramatically improve forecasting of storms, tornados, flash floods and other weather events.