Southampton Uni's computer whizzes develop 'mini' grid
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A safe place for students to play In a bid to help its students explore the potential of grid computing, the University of Southampton's Computer Science department has developed what it calls a "lightweight grid". The system has been designed to allow students to experiment with grid technology without the complexity of inherent security concerns of the real thing.â¦
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Michael Dell has seen the future and it&#39;s a 128-node &quot;MegaGrid&quot; running the Linux operating system on Dell servers at Dell&#39;s lab in Austin, Texas.
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Dell has teamed up with cluster-management app-maker Platform Computing Inc. to create a small but powerful rack-mounted server complete with open-source cluster-management tools.
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Storage is for little people, too Fujitsu Siemens Computers (FSC) thinks storage area networking is for the little guys too. It has drummed up a technology bundle and a marketing slogan - 'My very first SAN' - to capture that lucrative, but oh so elusive, small and medium-sized business (SMB) market.â¦
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Sun has a laudable vision of the future of utility computing, where organisations with extra processing power can sell it back to a computing grid in the same manner that homes with solar panels can sell power back to the electrical power grid.
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With notebook computer configurations now ranging from tiny ultra portables to hefty desktop PC replacements, it's clear that one size was never meant to fit all. After a few weeks of trying out the Fujitsu LifeBook P7010D, I was convinced it didn't fit me.
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Researchers have built a prototype of a 'desktop supercomputer' that runs 100 times faster than today's PCs.
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The world&#39;s largest permanent computing grid has gone online, giving scientists access to the processing power of 6,000 computers at 78 locations, including 1,000 at 12 sites across the UK.
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Lower electrical power consumption, not just greater data processing oomph, will help a new class of desktop supercomputers unveiled on Monday turn conventional industry logic on its head, its designers say.
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A forthcoming version of Windows Server is designed for building supercomputers from clusters of PCs.
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A new company thinks it has the answer to the complaints of scientists and engineers looking for high-performance computing (HPC) on the desktop.
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The Hitachi 2400 Smart Windshield: You think you got clutter on your computer display? Ha! Screech! CRASH!
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Preview Smaller than a laptop, bigger than a PDA - the perfect PC size?
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(InfoWorld) - What if your desktop computer could run 100 times faster than a PC and were simple enough for a high school student to program? That's not an idle question. Researchers at the University of Maryland have built a prototype of a "desktop supercomputer" that can do just that. The new computer is at least three years from reaching commercial markets, but it could have a big effect in industries that process large loads of data. They include the pharmaceutical, aerospace, military and entertainment industries, for applications such as drug modeling, computer-aided design, and digital content creation. The Explicit Multi-Threading (XMT) computer combines the decades-old philosophy of using parallel computing algorithms with the huge number of transistors in modern processors. The machine uses three field-programmable gate array chips from Xilinx to represent a network of 64 ARM processors that control dozens of threads of simultaneous computation, says Uzi Vishkin, a professor at theÂ A. James Clark School of EngineeringÂ who built the machine with his graduate students. The team is now trying to shrink the prototype, a license-plate-size board running at 75 MHz, down to a fingernail-size version running between 1GHz and 2GHz. Team members took the first step toward that goal this summer by commissioning IBM to manufacture a CMOS silicon application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) with an on-chip data interconnect network. The venture is funded with a grant from the U.S. Department of Defense, Vishkin says. A kid could do it Even if they succeed in building a smaller version of the prototype, the researchers will face the challenge of teaching programmers how to write software for a multithreaded system. Many commercial software companies are already puzzling over a similar problem today as they try to adapt to the latest dual- and quad-core processors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. However, Vishkin says his system will be easier to program than applications for commercial multicore chips because the XMT algorithms appear to the operating system to be a single thread. "If you build it in a way that people cannot program it, it remains in the ivory tower of theory," he says. To prove his point, before the end of this year, Vishkin is planning to teach a class of high school students how to program the XMT using a version of the C programming language. He will teach college students to program the prototype in the first quarter of 2008. User wish list A desktop supercomputer would be a godsend for students and artists who rely on computers to process huge amounts of data in the creation of high-resolution digital pictures and movies, says Jon Stiles, director of campus technology at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design in Denver. "That would absolutely revolutionize our animation department," Stiles says, adding that currently, students at the college often have to wait for nine or 10 hours while their PCs process the data in a new design. "We're constantly looking for ways to eliminate bottlenecks in production," he says. Stiles warns, however, that a parallel supercomputer would have to meet three conditions before the college could use it. It would have to offer vast data storage, be capable of running standard commercial software such as Adobe Systems' Creative Suite 3 and consume the same amount of energy as current computers. If those conditions were met, Stiles says, "my campus IT support manager would do back flips." Energy use shouldn't be a problem, says Vishkin. "Based on back-of-the-envelope calculations, we believe that each cluster we have will consume not much more power than a standard core," he says. "So we will be competitive on power draw with the same generation of multicore chips."
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Thousands of university applications are thought to have been delayed by computer problems.
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By Brad Hem, Houston Chronicle  Feb. 18--An engineering team at HP had figured out how to squeeze a faster and more powerful computer server into one-third the traditional space. That was supposed to be the hard part.
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Long-planned escape from beige boxes Analysis Microsoft's announcement of Surface Computing, basically a PC built into a coffee table, might indeed represent a new paradigm in computing technology, but for Microsoft it's just another attempt at getting its software out from the beige boxes under our desks to somewhere, anywhere, else.â¦