China claims supercomputer among world's fastest
China announced its fastest supercomputer yet on Thursday in the country's latest show of its goal to become a world leader in technology. Read more...

Survey revives debate over the future of the mainframe

NICS joins petaflop supercomputer club

IBM plans big hardware upgrade next year

Update: IBM faces DOJ antitrust probe on mainframes

IBM using nanotech to read DNA, personalize medicine

SGI aims at 'personal supercomputing' that's cheap, easy to use

Bank of America touts mainframe work as a safe career

SEC looks to ban 'flash' trading

U.S. buys weather supercomputer with twin backup

More Mainframes and Supercomputers Stories

The 11 most influential microprocessors of all time
From the brains of the Voyager space mission to the inspiration for modern CPUs, here are the chips that built our modern technological culture.

Now Departing: Union Pacific's 40-Year-Old Mainframe
Union Pacific, the railroad company that transports chemicals, coal, food, minerals and automobiles in and around 23 Western U.S. states, has had two workhorses that toiled tirelessly for the past four decades: the diesel locomotive and the IBM mainframe.

Things CIOs Must Know About Mainframe Modernization
1. Mainframe shops have to make decisions: whether to migrate to other platforms, add service-oriented architecture (SOA) interfaces or rewrite applications. With a half-baked strategy, IT winds up "bolting on all sorts of unusual, often architecturally inelegant" work-arounds, argues John B. Rabon, manager of legacy modernization at Aflac. "We saw this happening. You hit this wall of unintended consequences." Aflac is now 60 percent finished with a major conversion initiative.

Swine flu spreads, Apple hires, Twitter hack
Hands down, the swine-flu outbreak captured the headlines this week (and led to some obviously hysterically hyped headlines along the way). Amid the speculation about how much havoc the new virus will wind up wreaking on the world, there also was some more moderated speculation about what Apple is up to in hiring a bunch of chip designers. Oh, and another high-profile Twitter account was hacked ... again.

Need a supercomputer? This guy builds them himself
Bruce Allen is perhaps the world's best do-it-yourselfer. When he needed a supercomputer to crunch the results of gravitational-wave research, he built one with his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

College dropout is one-man IT shop — at college lab
Meet Justin King -- the one-man IT shop. At the five-year-old Human Neuroimaging Laboratory at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, IT plays a key role in innovative research involving functional magnetic resonance imaging machines.

Supercomputer race: It's a tricky task to boost (and measure) system speed
Now that supercomputing's petaflops barrier has been broken, the next goal is obvious. Unless, that is, the Top500 list is getting ahead of reality.

Five movies starring computers
Five movies that feature computers and programs as part of the cast.

Supercomputer helps with cancer research
Designing new cancer drugs requires an understanding of the structure of proteins, with more than 90 million images to analyze and interpret.

Q&A: What Roadrunner's petaflop Top500 milestone is all about
The Top500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers passed a milestone Wednesday with the first system to achieve peak performance of 1 petaflop, or one quadrillion floating point operations per second. Erich Strohmaier, a computer scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, was one of the founding editors of the Top500 list back in 1993. He talked with IDG News Service about the performance gains the list has seen, the quad-core processors that are coming to dominate it and mistakes that can creep in when the list is put together.

Editors' Picks

The updated iMac now offers a screen resolution that's higher than HD. The Droid comes with Android 2.0, the slimmest QWERTY slider, a 3.7-in. display and Verizon's network. Is the iPhone in trouble? Didn't think hardware this tiny could be tweaked? Think again. We explore five ways to turn netbooks up to 11. Abundant spectrum resources and an engaged research community are drawing wireless experimenters back into a hobby that many had forgotten.

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