Stories about: National Research

Technicians at Purdue University wanted to assemble their own supercomputer, and they had some high expectations. Apparently, they could have set them even higher.

Although boxing legend George Foreman, a judge on the second-year CBS reality show American Inventor, has yet to invent a network device, his Lean Mean Grilling Fat-Reducing Machine has been used by countless techies to quickly cook sandwiches and hamburgers after a long day in the data center.

Advances in IT over the decades have come mostly in small increments -- Release 2.3 yields to 2.4, transistors shrink a few more nanometers, Ethernet gets another speed boost, bugs are fixed, and algorithms get tweaked. That kind of evolutionary approach has served users well, boosting speeds, capacities and application capabilities by many orders of magnitude.

The days of selling software through the traditional commercial model are numbered, as open source is becoming the paradigm of choice, said Greg Stein, chairman of the Apache Software Foundation, at the EclipseCon 2006 conference on Wednesday.

Google has boosted its executive team by hiring Internet pioneer Vinton Cerf as its chief Internet evangelist, the California company announced.

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is finally giving networking technology a little respect. On Tuesday, the 58-year-old organization for computing professionals announced plans to award Internet pioneers Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn its prestigious A.M. Turing Award.

North American carrier Sprint and the Swedish National Research and Education Network (Sunet) announced Friday that they have set a world record for transporting a large volume of data over a public network.

Australia's premier supercomputing facility will increase its computational capacity by up to 10 times following an injection of $29 million in government funding.

A Japanese national research laboratory has placed an order with IBM for a supercomputer cluster that, when completed, is expected to be the most powerful Linux-based computer in the world.

IBM Wednesday introduced its first server based on Advanced Micro Devices' 32-/64-bit Opteron chip, pushing the new eServer 325 as an integral part of its expanded Linux cluster offerings. It also announced a new Linux cluster that includes DB2 for Linux, which is its first database offering generally available for the Opteron processor.

Technology trade shows have always been occasions for companies to trot out their new products for display to a curious public. Increasingly, however, they are also a forum in which industry organisations publicise their latest initiatives, guidelines and working groups.