Maybe I'm getting old, but the petascale era of supercomputing still feels new to me. On the other hand, the recent decommissioning of IBM's Roadrunner, the world's first petaflopper, suggests otherwise. Roadrunner booted up at the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory five years ago in 2008. Its retirement last week marks the approximate mid-point between the first petaflop system and the first exaflop one -- assuming, of course, you're an exascale optimist.

Intel’s Winston Saunders with Part II of his feature piece on how the most recent Top500 and Green500 machines stack up in terms of Exascalar, the “logarithmic distance” to 1018 flops in a 20 MegaWatt power envelope.

With the recent publication of the Top500 and Green500 lists of the world’s most powerful and efficient supercomputers, Intel’s Winston Saunders pulls together another look at Exascalar. 

The new year begins like the old year ends: Delays with Windows tablets, bugs in hardware and software and glimpses of new – naturally much better – chips, like Nvidia's Wayne.

The start of December is when the International Electron Devices Meeting IEDM traditionally takes place. Next to the presentation of numerous new designs (with and without silicon), its agenda always includes an overview of the latest process technology.

The semi-annual HPC "500 list" time and its attendant fall iron horse racing season are upon us. Thanks to the hard work of the list keepers, we currently enjoy three major ones to review, compare and contrast: TOP500, Green500 and Graph 500. Each focuses on a distinct aspect of HPC – number crunching, energy efficiency, and data crunching, respectively – and together they allow us to construct our own type of Triple Crown. Since new race results were recently announced, let's take a look at the current standings.

The slides from the TOP500 BoF Session at SC12 in Salt Lake City, Utah are now available. Special for this year was the presentation by Horst Simon of all systems that made it to the top of the list in the last 20 years and a special presentation by Hans Meuer about sites entering the list for the first time. The TOP500 BoF session was held on November 13, 2012.

MANNHEIM, Germany; BERKELEY, Calif.; and KNOXVILLE, Tenn.—Advanced reports that Oak Ridge National Laboratory was fielding the world’s fastest supercomputer were proven correct when the 40th edition of the twice-yearly TOP500 List of the world’s top supercomputers was released today (Nov. 12, 2012). Titan, a Cray XK7 system installed at Oak Ridge, achieved 17.59 Petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second) on the Linpack benchmark. Titan has 560,640 processors, including 261,632 NVIDIA K20x accelerator cores.

Do you remember the machine that took the first No. 1 position when the list debuted way back in 1993? Or how many consecutive lists were topped by the Earth Simulator? And when did Roadrunner make it into first place?

The PC market is in a tailspin and many companies have to announce very poor results and yet, we also have some winners. AMD is definitely not among them, a mass layoff looms on the horizon. And, again, take-over rumors are circulating.