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 [...]

Facebook recently announced some milestones, which suggests they are maintaining one heck of a server and storage farm. They announced that their users have now uploaded over 10 billion photos to the site. Since they actually store four image sizes for each uploaded photo, so that’s over 40 billion files. Facebook also pointed out that [...]