HP parks Airbus supers in containers

According to a story from The Register HP delivered two 40 footer containers with a whopping 24,192 core High Performance Cluster to Airbus Industries. The system ranks 29th on the June 2011 Top 500 list of HPC's. It makes you wonder why on earth you would change HP into a services corporation while they still perform very well in the server business.

Oracle may "fork itself" with recent MySQL moves

Ars Technica has an opinion article about the way Oracle is moving with MySQL. With commercial only options, support contracts raised from $650 to $2000 it undoubtly makes more money but kills the OSS community around MySQL. Something Larry promised not to do in negotiatons with the EU. He will come away with it because small startups forked MySQL succesfully so it ain't dead yet. I personally think the great winner will be PostgreSQL because of the technical superiority and because it is still OSS.

Kal-El Has Five Cores, Not Four: NVIDIA Reveals the Companion Core

AnandTech reports about the next generation ARM SoC from NVidia nicknamed Kal-El which most likely will be base of the Tecra 3 platform. What takes most attention is the design of 4+1 processor core the so-called companion core. This fifth core is a low power one and the processor will switch from four high performance cores to this low power core in idle state by gating the high performance one's. A nice design which helps the power consumption at a affordable rate when idling. It is also a sign of the diverse landscape of ARM processors sharing the core logic but resulting in very different SoC's.

$1,279-per-hour, 30,000-core cluster built on Amazon EC2 cloud

Ars Technica reports about using the cloud which is in this case Amazon EC to run a 30.000 node cluster. Spreaded across different zones and running voor about 7 hours costing a $1,279 per hour it shows the power of the cloud at it's best. Of course using a cluster is particular interesting for computing jobs which can be parallelized but none the less using the cloud should be a lot cheaper then an inhouse cluster. Ironically it is like the old fashioned mainframe on which you rented computercycles in minutes, long time ago. Which reminds to Ecclesiastes 1:9 The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. 10 Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.

Off-the-shelf servers spar with million-dollar storage arrays

Commoditization of storage arrays by use of off the shelf servers is coming to town.The Register has the story about VMworld 2011 where in a hands on lab three contenders were competing with their storage arrays. Well known vendors EMC and NetApp against Nexenta who build a storage array based on common of the shelf server parts for a fraction of the costs. EMC and NetApp are of course not happy with it but the message is clear: adapt or die.

Intel preps 15-Watt 'Sandy Bridge' for micro servers

Unlike AMD Intel has deep pockets for R&D. The Register reports that Intel developed a new Sandy Bridge variant with a low 15W TDP especially for microservers which are suitable for dedicated hosting and Web infrastructure workloads. Those still growing niche amount for 10% of the server market and is the target of some ARM-based servermakers like Calxeda. Intel is not giving up without a fight and those ARM-server will have to be decent priced and have better cycles/per watt performance to stay ahead of Intel. Fair competition is fine, only problem is Intel did not really like [b]fair[/b] competition in the past.

AMD snags Guinness World Record for clockiest chip

In not dead yet The Register reports the worldrecord fastest chip for AMD. They clocked a prerelease eight-core AMD FX desktop processor to 8.429GHz which is a amazing speed of course. But they can not beat Intel's current line of Core i processors and their marketshare is too little and they earn too little to continue financing the R&D effort to beat Intel. Collaboration with ARM would be a far better option especially to develope energy saving chips but it is not likely to happen.