The 25th International Supercomputing Conference – ISC’10 – presents researchers an excellent opportunity to share their latest results, projects and innovations in the Research Poster Session, June 1–2, 2010 in Hamburg, Germany.

Submitted posters will be reviewed and evaluated by the ISC’10 Research Poster Committee based on their originality, significance, quality and clarity. The best poster will receive the ISC’10 Research Poster Award. A minimum of 20 posters will be accepted for presentation at ISC’10.

While RISC-, Itanium- and Unix-server sales continue to drop, the x86-server market, which IBM and others are intent on reanimating, is recovering. Meanwhile, Intel has other worries.

A stroke surprised Intel’s crown prince, the 53-year-old British Sean M. Maloney, at home; we take the opportunity to wish him a speedy recovery. But even if he is able to fully recover within a few months, which is hoped for, it’s likely that this shot across the bows will give the hard-working manager pause. Will he still strive for the stressful job of CEO then? For now, his duties have been taken over by his colleague David (Dadi) Perlmutter, co-general manager of Intel’s Architecture Group, who seized the opportunity to say some strong words at an investors’ conference; amongst other things he commented on the graphics market, saying that “relatively few” people need high performance graphics. That, of course, is easy to say after burying one’s own high performance graphics product, the Larrabee. Intel will now focus on less powerful, but also cheaper integrated graphics, a market, in which – according to Perlmutter – Intel can now offer the best solution with its graphics chips that are integrated into the processor housing. However, he also acknowledged that AMD/ATI had offered better integrated solutions up to then. Competitor AMD/ATI is also throwing more and more DirectX 11 products on the market while Intel – still unable to offer any DirectX 11 products – can only stand and watch.

They are not even official yet: the new server processors Nehalem-EX from Intel and Magny-Cours from AMD. Nonetheless, the competition between the four-cylinder Formula One racers is already in full swing. They are even up for order at English and Canadian webshops.

That’s the way the cookie crumbles. Just when – after years of struggling with the Itanium – Intel is finally able to roll out the long-delayed product, the bad blue competition from Armonk spoiled the merry launch party.

Shocked, Intel didn’t present a single concrete benchmark result for their new 9300 line (Tukwila); no mention of a “World Record Performance” in a standard industry benchmark as former business boss Pat Gelsinger had promised (I’ll have to get in touch with him concerning out bet).

Yes, we can: With a little help from a friend, AMD was finally, after 12 negative quarters, able to show a profit of 1.18 billion dollars. Things are starting to look brighter for the scene in general, although a few are still wrestling with problems.

Computational science is the field of study concerned with constructing mathematical models and numerical techniques that represent scientific, social scientific or engineering problems and employing these models on computers, or clusters of computers to analyze, explore or solve these models. Numerical simulation enables the study of complex phenomena that would be too expensive or dangerous to study by direct experimentation. The quest for ever higher levels of detail and realism in such simulations requires enormous computational capacity, and has provided the impetus for breakthroughs in computer algorithms and architectures. Due to these advances, computational scientists and engineers can now solve large scale problems that were once thought intractable by creating the related models and simulate them via high performance compute clusters or supercomputers. Simulation is being used as an integral part of the manufacturing, design and decision making processes, and as a fundamental tool for scientific research. Problems where high performance simulation play a pivotal role include for example weather and climate prediction, nuclear and energy research, simulation and design of vehicles and aircrafts, electronic design automation, astrophysics, quantum mechanics, biology, computational chemistry and more.

They were almost history, but they got a second chance and here they come: the tablet PCs. The talk at is about Microsoft, HP, Dell, Nvidia, Apple, Google and many others – and increasingly about snapping dragons, too.

Apple did it again. Just like last year at CeBIT, with the news of the Nehalem processor inside the Mac Pro, Apple’s marketing strategists managed to draw a lot of attention - without even being present as an exhibitor or actually having a product to show off.

The 32nm processors, with which Intel is initiating the era of the x86 CPUs with integrated graphics, are not exactly keeping their old promises – but yesterday’s sins are now catching up with Intel.

Just one and a half years ago, Intel published “Detecting Multi-Core Processor Topology in an IA-32 Platform” where it explained how to correctly determine the CPU topology in a future-proof way in order to optimally distribute one’s software on any system. Whoever counted on that ... will now be disabused: at least in the systems we have tested until now, the Arrandale and Clarkdale processors behave like quad-core processors with crossed out cores and so the “robust algorithm” that Intel presented then, now returns “holes” in the core IDs. And although the newest processor generation features a nice extension of the CPUID command, which can alternatively provide Information about the Topology, old software might fall flat on its face for now.

After a vague announcement at the SC09 supercomputing conference, Intel has now let the cat out of Schrödinger’s bag: the planned graphics processor Larrabee is dead and alive at once.

Nick Knupffer, the PR Manager responsible for high performance computing (HPC), officially confirmed that the Larrabee is not – as was originally planned – going to be released as a standalone product, as a GPU on a PCI express card, like Radeon or GeForce, in the first quarter of 2010. It will presumably appear sometime later, but at first only for the HPC market, not for the consumer market.

Still, the already fully developed cards are not going to be pulped, but used as development platform for the subsequent Larrabee generations.

Sun’s Rock is dead; long live Rock Creek, Intel’s new experimental processor. Intel hopes for EU research funds – and for a friendlier new EU competition commissioner. AMD is going to talk about new deactivatable cores at the ISSCC conference.