HAMBURG, Germany—China’s ambition to enter the supercomputing arena have become obvious with a system called Nebulae, build from a Dawning TC3600 Blade system with Intel X5650 processors and NVidia Tesla C2050 GPUs. Nebulae is currently the fastest system worldwide in theoretical peak performance at 2.98 PFlop/s. With a Linpack performance of 1.271 PFlop/s it holds the No. 2 spot on the 35th edition of the closely watched TOP500 list of supercomputers.

Intel gets off lightly in the dispute with the American Federal Trade Commission (FTC), AMD makes the Atom competitor Ontario highest priority and postpones other processors and the digits of Pi have finally been calculated to 5 trillion decimal places.

Does Microsoft plan to gain respect with a proprietary processor ¬¬– for a new Xbox perhaps? Meanwhile: former Xbox partner IBM comes up with new processors for mainframe computers as well as new concept – and new troubles with the EU.

The corporations are making good profits, new acquisitions change the landscape here and there, storage giant EMC² positions itself more strongly against Oracle and Co. and new architectures for the power-sensitive cloud computing sector are running (less) hot.

AMD launches the Opteron 4100, HP new Magny-Cours and Nehalem-EX systems with a self-developed chipset – and Intel a small commotion.

On the last day of the 37th International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA 2010), the Intel developer Team caused quite a commotion in the corsair stronghold Saint-Malo: they debunked the hundred-times-faster myth of GPUs compared to CPUs (Debunking the 100X GPU vs. CPU Myth: An Evaluation of Throughput Computing on CPU and GPU). Normally, this symposium is concerned with the fundamentals of future architectures, not performance comparisons of commercial hardware – and if such comparisons are made, they are presented by neutral scientists, rather than an involved company.

Friendly e-mails between the bosses of big IT companies show how they do business. The chip manufacturers are again investing billions into new fabs and the server racks and blades are hastily being equipped with PCIe-16 slots to make them ready for the hot GPGPU cards.

While a surprising wave of resignations washes CDU (Christian Democratic Union, Germany) politicians off their office chairs, oily waves arrive at the beaches of the Gulf of Mexico and German schlager fans celebrate the “la ola” atmosphere, Taipei was hit by a wave of tablets. Meanwhile, Intel announces processors with more than 50 cores for 2012.

The biannual Top 500 supercomputer list has been released. Use this graphic to explore the world's fastest number crunchers or find out more about alternative supercomputer powers .

HAMBURG, Germany, May 17, 2010 – If you can’t make it to Hamburg for ISC’10, the 25th International Supercomputing Conference, you can still catch some of the program highlights via live streaming over the web.

In addition, ISC’10 will be producing a daily video blog highlighting the newest, coolest and most informative discoveries and developments of each day and posting them on the ISC’10 website. ISC’10 will be held May 30 – June 3 in the Congress Center Hamburg.

The ISC’10 live videos will be streamed over the University of Hamburg web site.

Intel plans to shake up the market for the small mobile devices with the new Atom offspring Moorestown but some of Intel’s partners have their own plans. HP does this and that, buys Palm and rolls out the first Itanium Tukwila systems.