At this week’s Supercomputing 2008 conference, Microsoft Corp. announced that it had debuted in the top 10 of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. The mega-installation is at Shanghai Supercomputer Center and Dawning Information Industry Co. Ltd., which ranked at No. 10 with 180.6 teraflops, the parallel computing speed, and 77.5 percent efficiency. Microsoft points out [...]

IBM may be a big, lumbering multi-billion-dollar corporation that is slow to turn, but boy, when IBMers get imaginative, they get imaginative. Steve Craggs of Lustratus Research recently marveled on what has become a fast-growing phenomenon: deployments of the open source Linux operating systems on mainframes. “Five or ten years ago, this sort of question [...]