gManZboy writes: "Is it an oxymoron to have an efficient supercomputer? Wu-Chun Feng (Los Alamos National Laboratory) doesn't believe so - Green Destiny and its children are Transmeta-based supercomputers that Wu thinks are fast enough, at a fraction of the heat/energy/cost, according to ACM Queue." 240 processors running under 5.2kW (or less!) is nothing to sneeze at. The article offers up this question: might there be other metrics that might be important to supercomputing, rather than relying solely on processing speed?

guts writes "Those interested in parallel computing can enter warriors in the new GRID WARS INTERACTIVE contest by downloading the challenge kit from www.gridwars.com. Prizes will be awarded to those who submit the most winning warriors, with the championship held live at Supercomputing SC2003 in Phoenix in November. Details available on the web site." (See this earlier story about Grid Wars, too.)

YourMacLife writes "On tonight's Your Mac Life, the Dean of Virginia Tech's College of Engineers, Hassan Aref, will talk about the G5 cluster the college is building and what it means to supercomputing. Questions can be sent in advance to onair@yourmaclife.com." See the web site for more details.

Boone^ writes "The New York Times has an article (free reg. req.) talking about Cray Inc.'s recent resurgence in the realm of supercomputing. It discusses a bit of Cray's decline when the Cold War ended, "the occupation" under SGI, and the rebirth of the company after the Tera (now Cray Inc.) purchase. Recently Cray Inc. has been shipping their vector-based Cray X1 machine, designing ASCI Red Storm, and recently was one of 3 (also Sun, IBM) to win a large DARPA contract (PDF link) to design and develop a PetaFlops machine by 2010. Could Cray Inc. be poised for a comeback? Wall Street seems to think so."

securitas writes "The NY Times reports that a pair of Microsoft researchers are challenging the federal policy on funding supercomputers. Gordon Bell and Jim Gray argue that the money would be better spent on massive storage instead of ultra-fast computers because they believe today's supercomputing centers will be tomorrow's superdata centers. They advocate building cheap Linux-based Beowulf clusters (PCs in parallel) instead of supercomputers." NYTimes free reg blah blah.

Mr. Spock writes "The National Center for Supercomputing Applications is looking at scientific computing on the Sony Playstation 2. They've set up a cluster with 65 compute nodes. They're running Linux for Playstation 2. What will they think of next?"

nkrgovic writes " SGI has just launched a new CPU - the long expected R16000. The new CPU works on 700MHz, has 4MB secondary cache and more goodies. For now the new CPU is only used in SGI's Fuel workstations, but we should expect to see it pretty soon in SGI's Origin servers as well. With new high density compute nodes this should make the Origin's the fastest supercomputing server per square foot."

Seanasy writes "Recent simulations on the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center's Terascale Computing System suggest that planet formation may take a lot less time than previously thought. The results were published in SCIENCE."

jarrod.smith writes " According to SGI will unveil its Intel® Itanium® 2 NUMAflex shared-memory supercomputer architecture (which runs Linux as its OS) at Supercomputing 2002 which runs this week in Baltimore, MD. The link at SGI says the system will be on display at the show. The exhibit floor opens this evening. Unfortunately I did not go this year. Can those lucky enough to be at the meeting scope it out and post comments?"

This is a "needs no introduction" introduction, because Donald Becker is one of the people who has been most influential in making GNU/Linux a usable operating system, and is also one of the "fathers" of Beowulf and commodity supercomputing clusters in general. Usual Slashdot interview rules apply, plus a special one for this interview only: "What if we made a Beowulf cluster of these?" is not an appropriate question.

Chip Smith sent us a short excerpt from a news article on Supercomputing Online: "Just yesterday Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and several key partners put together a demonstration system running a real-world scientific application to produce data on one cluster, and then send the resulting data across a 10 Gigabit Ethernet connection to another cluster, where it is then rendered for visualization." Here's the link to follow if you'd like to read more on this experiment.

aarondsouza writes: "The NY Times (registration required, mumble... mutter...) has this story on two different directions being taken in the supercomputing community. The Los Alamos labs have a couple of new toys. One built for raw numbercrunching speed, and the other for efficiency. The article has interesting numbers on the performance/price (price in the power consumption and maintenance sense) ratios for the two machines. As an aside... 'Deep Blue', 'Green Blade' ... wonder what Google Sets would think of that..."

Dhrakar writes: "Now, I know that normally press releases are imediately round-filed, however, as this is the first NEC^H^H^HCray SX-6 to be installed in the U.S. it is newsworthy. The 8cpu, 64Gb system has been installed at the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center for benchmarking and other testing. See either ARSC or the NY Times (sub. required. Yada, yada) article."

Paul E writes: " An atlanta company seems to have developed (modified?) a linux clustering platform that is very conducive to FPS games. These guys apparently have built a cluster that will be pushing 2 TerraFlops, which would easily put it between Blue Pacific and Blue Mountain . Interesting that the same time the .mil starts making FPS's, FPS platforms are outperforming some of the top defense labs."

The Griller writes "Gordon Bell, one of the creators of VAX, and Linus Torvalds were at the launch of a new supercomputing platform at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Based on Crusoe processors from Transmeta and running a version of linux, it is aimed at being cheaper than conventional supercomputers by requiring no cooling and lower maintenance. " Basically, it's blade clustering, using Beowulf.

Sivar writes: "Cray, a well known vendor of extremely fast supercomputing hardware, has introduced a storage system with a 224 GB capacity. The large size seems impressive, but the device can also transfer an unprecedented 80GB(!!) every second. That's more bandwidth than the main memory of most servers, and it's just for storage. For comparison's sake, a typical dual channel DDR motherboard has a bandwidth capacity of barely 4.2GB/sec." Yow.

September 11 is transforming our notions about a raft of subjects, from economics to technology. Thanks to our myopic and narcissistic media and opportunistic, short-sighted politicians, we are only beginning to grasp the ways in which computer networks are changing, even radicalizing much of the world, sometimes in great, sometimes horrific ways. Six months ago, most Americans were stunned to discover how differently others in the world regard us from the way we see ourselves. Globalism is a major reason. Invasive American culture -- from movies, music, fast-food -- have highlighted political and religious differences, from Europe to the Middle East and South Asia. So have networked, hi-tech economies based on information and tech, argues a new book by George Soros.

Cranial Dome writes "According to this Cnet.com story, the Department of Energy (DOE) is working to interconnect the first two computers which will form the genesis of the DOE Science Grid, a virtual supercomputing system which will eventually encompass many more systems at several locations. The larger of the two machines: DOE National Energy Research Science Center's (NERSC) IBM SP RS/6000, a distributed memory machine with 2,944 compute processors. This machine, together with a smaller 160 processor Intel system, will make up a combined 3,328 processor Unix system with 1.3 petabytes(!) of storage space. And this is only the beginning..."

An Anonymous Coward writes: "According to this article at CNET, India is building a country-wide High Speed Network. Named the "I-Grid" (I is for 'Information' silly !), its a feat for the Indians who have been bogged down by U.S. sanctions in the recent past -- besides, with a country as big as theirs, its one helluva project!"

onyxcide writes: "Envision is running a quick article on a new national grid of computing resources called TeraGrid. Half a petabyte of disk storage, 40-gigabyte-per-second national optical backbone, and 13 teraflops of computing power will make up this monster. It will allow "lavish amounts of online data to be continually available for instantaneous analysis, data mining, and knowlege synthesis." There's another article in the same magazine here: Transforming Research with High-Performance Grid Computing" LighthouseJ adds some details: "C|Net's news.com has a story about a new Compaq supercomputer named Terascale. It uses 3,000 Alpha EV68 processors distributed over 750 servers using networking systems from Quadrics. They say it can perform as fast as 10,000 desktop PC's combined in one second. The massive computer will make it's official debut on Monday at the Supercomputing Center in Pittsburgh PA."