Computers/Servers

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) has taken delivery of a new IBM supercomputer that will advance research into severe weather and the future of Earth's climate. The supercomputer, known as a Power 575 Hydro-Cluster, is the first in a highly energy-efficient class of machines to be shipped anywhere in the world.

NASA, Intel Corp., and SGI have signed an agreement establishing intentions to collaborate on significantly increasing the space agency's supercomputer performance and capacity.

Under the terms of a Space Act Agreement, NASA will work closely with Intel and SGI to increase computational capabilities for modeling and simulation at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.

Three researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have proposed an innovative way to improve global climate change predictions by using a supercomputer with low-power embedded microprocessors, an approach that would overcome limitations posed by today’s conventional supercomputers.

Although the digital age is well under way, one crucial detail remains to be worked out--how to store vast amounts of digital information in a way that allows future generations to recover it.

"The problem is how to build a large-scale data storage system to last 50 to 100 years," said Ethan Miller, associate professor of computer science in the Baskin School of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Supercomputers simulate products and manufacturing processes with-in minutes. In the Computer Aided Robust Design CAROD project, Fraunhofer researchers are developing new methods and software that significantly improve the quality of the virtual components.

Trucks drive thousands of kilometers through Europe every month, taking oranges from Greece to Scandinavia, delivering Spanish vegetables to German wholesalers, and collecting milk from farms in the region to take it to central dairies. To make sure the tires, wheel rims and other parts will survive the many kilometers without breaking down, the manufacturers test prototypes in test rigs to discover their service life. Such a test often lasts several weeks, yet it can be rendered useless by malfunctions, such as when bearings or sensors wear out. In the Computer Aided Robust Design (CAROD) project, research scientists from seven Fraunhofer Institutes are devising methods with which malfunctions of this nature can be simulated ahead of time. The researchers are using the results to develop sturdy test rigs for life-cycle tests.

Seagate (NYSE: STX) has begun worldwide shipment of its 1 terabyte (TB) enterprise-class Barracuda® ES.2 hard drives with a Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface. Applications addressing rich media content and collaborative applications like email can benefit from the average 135% performance boost over SATA-interface drives along with robust enterprise features and native compatibility.

A new desktop computer based on the VIA pc2500 mainboard has been developed for the Brazilian Market. The Bitway Flex PC will be available from major retailers throughout Brazil for a recommended retail price of R$800, and comes complete with monitor, stereo speakers, keyboard and mouse.

According to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, factory revenue in the worldwide server market grew 2.4% year over year to $15.7 billion in the fourth quarter of 2007 (4Q07), marking the seventh consecutive quarter of positive growth. Worldwide server unit shipments grew 9.0% in 4Q07 when compared with the year-ago period. For the full year 2007, worldwide server revenue grew 3.6% to $54.4 billion, while worldwide unit shipments grew 6.7% to 8.0 million units. This represents the highest annual server revenue since the market peaked in 2000 with factory revenue of more than $61.6 billion.

The National Science Foundation's Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate announced the creation of a strategic relationship with Google Inc. and IBM. The Cluster Exploratory (CluE) relationship will enable the academic research community to conduct experiments and test new theories and ideas using a large-scale, massively distributed computing cluster.

In an open letter to the academic computing research community, Jeannette Wing, the assistant director at NSF for CISE, said that the relationship will give the academic computer science research community access to resources that would be unavailable to it otherwise.

On January 26, 1700, at about 9 p.m. local time, the Juan de Fuca plate beneath the ocean in the Pacific Northwest suddenly moved, slipping some 60 feet eastward beneath the North American plate in a monster quake of approximately magnitude 9, setting in motion large tsunamis that struck the coast of North America and traveled to the shores of Japan.

Since then, the earth beneath the region – which includes the cities of Vancouver, Seattle and Portland -- has been relatively quiet. But scientists believe that earthquakes with magnitudes greater than 8, so-called “megathrust events,” occur along this fault on average every 400 to 500 years.