In Pictures: The 10 fastest supercomputers on Earth
The latest twice-yearly Top 500 report is out – see which supercomputers are the world's fastest.
The latest twice-yearly Top 500 report is out – see which supercomputers are the world's fastest.
Supercomputing power is being concentrated in a smaller number of machines, according to the latest Top 500 list of high-performance computers. Keepers of the list are uncertain how to parse that trend.
Helping scientific supercomputing take advantage of emerging big-data technologies, high-performance computing manufacturer Cray is releasing a set of packages promising to optimize the process of running Hadoop on the company's XC30 machines.
In the rush to exascale computing, Intel is making a small change that could have a big impact on system design with its upcoming Xeon Phi chip.
China has maintained its lead in the twice-yearly ranking of the world's most powerful supercomputers, with the Chinese National University of Defense Technology's Tianhe-2 system bringing 33.86 petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second) to the contest, almost twice the calculations offered by the runner up, the Titan Cray system run by the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
A new supercomputer being deployed this month in the U.S. is using solid-state drive storage as an alternative to DRAM and hard drives, which could help speed up internal data transfers.
Supercomputer maker Cray has hired the founders and key engineers of Gnodal who will be working to develop new technology.
Increasing sales of cheaper systems helped fuel growth in the high-performance computing (HPC) sector during the second quarter, while interest in high-end supercomputers cooled.
Cray is building a supercomputer for the University of Edinburgh in Scotland that will deliver petaflops of performance, which could put it on a future list of top supercomputers.
The developer of the most widely used test for ranking the performance of supercomputers has said his metric is out of date and proposed a new test that will be introduced starting in November.
China isn't downloading software off the Web to build its systems, it has design teams writing its software, says Argonne's Peter Beckman, who heads the DOE's exascale initiative.
Looking at historical trends and performance benchmarks, a team of researchers in Spain have concluded that smartphone chips could one day replace the more expensive and power-hungry x86 processors used in most of the world's top supercomputers.
A CSIRO joint venture will team up with Curtin University for a new facility that aims to enhance research capabilities.
IBM executives who are working with healthcare systems to perfect supercomputer Watson's ability to diagnose and suggest treatments. And by 2020, Watson could fit on a smartphone.
As supercomputers grow more powerful, they'll also grow more vulnerable to failure, thanks to the increased amount of built-in componentry. A few researchers at the recent SC12 conference, held last week in Salt Lake City, offered possible solutions to this growing problem.