computing (Written by Iain Thomson in San Francisco, 11 Feb 2010)

Sonas system will scale to 14 petabytes

IBM has introduced a network storage array based around its supercomputing platforms, and aimed at medium and large enterprises.

The Scale Out Network Attached Storage (Sonas) system uses between one and 30 storage 'pods' containing a storage node, a storage controller and 7,200 or 15,000 drives. These can be scaled up to a claimed 14.4 petabytes of storage.

ITWeb By Nicola Mawson, Johannesburg, 14 Jan 2010

The deal will see investment coming to SA, says HP's Manoj Bhoola.
Microsoft's $250 million collaboration with HP is set to benefit about 10 000 channel distributors in SA.

The deal, the largest to date in the companies' 25-year partnership, will also see some of the $250 million coming into SA in the form of marketing spend, skills development, and research and development investment.

ITWeb

(By Paul Furber, ITWeb contributor, Hamburg, 5 Jan 2010 ) Cloud computing has a bright future over the next four years, according to HP's VP and GM of software products, Robin Purohit.

Linux Magazine Douglas Eadline, Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009

Truth is stranger than fiction. The connection that helped end HPC careers and companies in 2009

Linux Magazine has an article by Christopher Smart, Tuesday, December 29th, 2009

The next twelve months will be good to Linux and Free software, but we won’t capture the market just yet.

Happy Christmas all! Back January!

Some time ago I started thinking about metrics to determine how [competent | relevant | successful | whatever ] our science policy was. (Some of you may have landed here by chance - you are probably looking for this.

I had to increase the scope of the project from science. The problem is determining what good is - ie "competent", "relevant", etc.

IT-Online - Supercomputer gets close to brain function Thursday, 19 November 2009, 09:16

IBM has unveiled significant progress toward creating a computer system that simulates and emulates the brain’s abilities for sensation, perception, action, interaction and cognition, while rivaling the brain’s low power and energy consumption and compact size.

The cognitive computing team, led by IBM Research, has achieved significant advances in large-scale cortical simulation and a new algorithm that synthesizes neurological data -- two major milestones that indicate the feasibility of building a cognitive computing chip.

The trend is to have your own "personal super computer" allowing testing of code and running of smaller jobs quickly and easily
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Personal Supercomputers Promise Teraflops on Your Desk

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/08/personal-supercomputers/

About a year ago John Stone, a senior research programmer at the University of Illinois, and his colleagues found a way to bypass the long waits for computer time at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

The BBC has an article

Jaguar Super Computer has taken the top slot from Roadrunner

China has become one of a handful of nations to own one of the top five supercomputers in the world.

Its Tianhe-1 computer, housed at the National Super Computer Center in Tianjin was ranked fifth on the biannual Top 500 supercomputer list.

The machine packs more than 70,000 chips and can compute 563 trillion calculations per second (teraflops).

It is used for petroleum exploration and engineering tasks such as simulating aircraft designs.