Stories about: Cray

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.

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.

Sun has open-sourced the preliminary compiler for its high-performance programming language project, Fortress.

More details about the hardware held at the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory has emerged: it uses Panasas clustered file storage for its petascale nuclear weapons testing supercomputer.

IBM and Cray have beat out Sun Microsystems to win sizable U.S government contracts to design a new generation supercomputer.

AMD is opening up its Opteron socket specification to the world under a new licensing plan called Torrenza.

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.

Cray plans to create a new supercomputing platform combining four different types of processing capability in a blade server architecture. The platform will run Linux on Advanced Micro Devices's Opteron processors, and should be on the market by 2010, a spokesman said Monday.