Stories about: Cray

A research director at Los Alamos National Laboratories said the addition of a peta-scale supercomputer is as big a leap forward as when scientists got their hands on their first computer ever.

Engineers and technicians at IBM are assembling the final pieces of what they hope will soon become the world's most powerful supercomputer - doubling the speed of the today's fastest machine.

Intel and Cray have launched a joint effort to develop new multi-core technologies as part of an effort to build multi-petascale systems.

When it comes to computing technology, the research goal of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency can be summed up in two words: power and speed.

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.

The trade show floor at the SC07 supercomputing conference in Reno, Nevada, last month had a futuristic, film noir feel, with low lights, large glowing screens and scattered towers that displayed the names of companies and national laboratories. It was a landscape that evoked the movie Blade Runner, and the exotic was the norm.

The importance of high-performance computing was starkly revealed this week by some numbers released by IDC: One in four of all microprocessors shipped Thursday are being installed in HPC systems.

The prediction of thunderstorms has never been an exact science. But a research team from the University of Oklahoma and the US federal government is poised to dramatically improve weather forecasting with supercomputer analyses of the individual cells that make up severe thunderstorms and tornadoes.

A technology mostly associated today with crackdowns on music and movie pirates could instead be used to help make multimedia content free -- and file-sharing legal.

A British online retailer "runs" its Web site using a bunch of obsolete home computers from the early 1980s, according to Internet monitoring company Netcraft.

Once the domain of monolithic, multimillion-dollar supercomputers from Cray and IBM, HPC (high-performance computing) is now firmly within reach of today's enterprise, thanks to the affordable computing power of clustered standards-based Linux and Microsoft servers running commodity Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron processors. Many early movers are in fact already capitalizing on in-house HPC, assembling and managing small-scale clusters on their own.