Data Center

Mainframes and Supercomputers Topic Center

Everything you need to know about mainframes and supercomputers: news, analysis, trends and more

Cray courts the big-data market

Supercomputer company Cray has created a new division that will sell big-data systems, the company has announced. The division will market its offerings to large enterprises, which will be a new kind of client for the company.
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U.S. to use climate to help cool exascale systems

In a picturesque spot overlooking San Francisco Bay, the U.S. Department of Energy's Berkeley Lab is building a new computing center that will one day house exascale systems.

China beefs up its HPC training

China can use its power of government control to bring major changes quickly, and it is moving to expand parallel programming training to help its supercomputing efforts.

Nvidia: Gaming systems to reach 'tens of teraflops' by 2019

Graphics processor maker Nvidia expects gaming systems will reach a performance of "tens of teraflops" by the end of the decade, and will be capable of displaying real-time visuals as good as the pre-rendered cut scenes found in games today, according to company CEO Jen-Hsun Huang.

U.S. HPC lead in danger

Programs to develop ever-higher performance exascale computing systems are underway around the world -- but the U.S. isn't yet leading the way after dominating high-performance computing development for decades. (Insider, registration required)

Automotive supplier doubles in size after adopting HPC

L&L Products, an automotive supplier in Michigan, grew dramatically after adding high performance computing to its manufacturing process.

Q&A: Exascale now a global race for tech

The international competition to build an exascale supercomputer is gaining steam. Peter Beckman, a top computer scientist at the Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, explains why the effort is important.

Better Windows Support Due on IBM Mainframes

IBM said its mainframes will soon be able to manage Windows applications, bridging one of the last major divides in data centers.

Intel pushes 50-core chip, mulls exascale computing

Intel is drumming up support for its latest 50-core Knights Corner and Xeon E5 server chips, which are key elements in the company's plans to scale performance while reducing power consumption moving toward an exascale supercomputer by 2018.

Amazon Web Services adds supercomputing service to its cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS) wants to attract more high-performance computing users to its cloud and has launched a public beta of Cluster Compute Eight Extra Large, its most powerful cloud service yet.

IT's most wanted: Mainframe programmers

As students study other technologies, vendors try to develop new talent and offer tools to fill the gap for these critical systems

A New Job for Mainframes?

Mainframes are stable, secure and could be perfect for anchoring a private cloud. But where's the user provisioning?

New job for mainframes: Cloud platform

As companies take steps to develop private clouds, mainframes are looking more and more like good places to house consolidated and virtualized servers. Their biggest drawback? User provisioning is weak.

You don't know tech: InfoWorld news quiz

Feb. 18, 2011: iPhones may get smaller, security firm gets unwelcome caller

The clock is ticking on encryption

The strength of today's communications security is based on the complexity of our encryption algorithms. But the day is coming when cracking those algorithms may be computationally trivial.

How China Will Eat the U.S.'s Tech Lunch

Is Congress really ready to make the U.S the world's No. 2 supercomputing power?

Disruptors have lasting impact on IT

Major market shifts in the database world don't happen often. When they do, they're massive, creating an impact that can last 10 to 20 years. When I entered the job market, it was right at the tail end of the last major shift from the mainframe to client/server.

QuickPoll: Should the U.S. be worried about China's supercomputing plans?

The Department of Energy says China is 12 to 18 months away from building an "entirely indigenous" supercomputer. Should the U.S. be worried?

Building inexpensive server clusters

It's possible to get some serious computing power out of graphics processing units and even PlayStations. Here's how four heavy hitters approached the issue.

What we miss about MIS: 5 old-school ideas that weren't so bad

Cobol was king and MIS ruled from on high -- some old-school tech management practices we'd like to see revived.