IBM abandons its Blue Water Project (10 Pflops)

IBM and the National Center of supercomputers at the University of Illinois announced abandon their Blue Waters project which aimed to create a machine with a maximum computing power of more than 10 Petaflops which started in 2008. It was the first to have a sustained computing power of more than 1 Pflops 2008 was a symbolic year for IBM since he was the first to leave a petaflops supercomputer in excess.

Google has more than 900,000 servers

Google has never publicly revealed how the company operates servers in the world. However, she wanted to give a good indication of the power consumption of all its servers in 2010: less than 2 billion kWh. This represents approximately 1% of consumption of all data centers worldwide, and 0.01% of global electricity consumption.

Google has this little confidence to Jonathan Koomey author of an annual energy consumption by data centers worldwide. According to Koomey, the power required to operate Google's servers would be a maximum of 220 megawatts. Given this information and energy efficiency of a server cloud Koomey estimates that Google does "only" 900,000 servers, not 1 million as some thought earlier.

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IBM creates a laboratory for the cloud

IBM has announced that it would create a Services Innovation Lab (SIL), a laboratory comprising two hundred experts of the company focus on developing solutions for testing and maintenance, among others, the clouds of company. The SIL is an extension of the division that is responsible for research and development of software and services.

IBM is clear that the primary purpose of its new lab will be to create software that will be resold to its customers. Specifically, the SIL will work to develop new services and cloud systems to easily move information and systems of a society in such infrastructure. IBM will also work to develop a dashboard to facilitate monitoring and network management.

The EU responds to Microsoft's confession on its Cloud

Microsoft has recently admitted that the data stored in the cloud were not immune to the U.S. Patriot Act that gives authorities the right to consult the files of any user without it being notified. This provision goes against European directives on the protection of personal data, which states that any customer should be notified if the host gives its data access.

This conflict between American and European laws hosts was noticed by Vice-President of the Committee on Civil Liberties in the European Parliament, who asked the question "The Commission considers does the Patriot Act prevails effectively on the European directive on data protection? What will the Commission to remedy this situation and ensure that European rules of data protection are being implemented and that the legislation of other countries does not override EU law? ".

icloud: online storage according to Apple

One of the highly anticipated announcements of WWDC 2011 was icloud, the online storage service to the firm that works on all apple products Mac OS X and IOS. Steve Jobs has explained that "icloud kept your important information and your content up to date on all your devices. The MobileMe service replaces complementing its functionality.

It is also compatible with Windows Vista and 7 and Outlook 2007 or 2010. MobileMe users will use the old service until June 30, 2012. After that date, Apple's servers disconnect. He extended subscriptions of users who will all expire at that time. It is of course possible to pass before icloud.

HFX PowerNAS: Core i5 and 15 TB for your data

HFX product for many years of PC cases entirely passive. The company has diversified into logically NAS, and launches its PowerNAS at Computex 2011, a PC that does not speak its name. Inside is a mini ITX motherboard with Intel chipset Zotac H67 and Sandy Bridge Intel (Core i3 and i5). The processing power of the NAS thus goes well beyond competing products using either Atom or ARM chips.

All this power is used by Windows Home Server 2011, the system dedicated to storing and sharing data from Microsoft. The system is hosted on a 2.5 "hard drive, data, they are spread over one to five 3.5" hard drives. 5 hard drives that can now be up to 3 TB each for a total of 15 TB in RAID5, the total capacity will be reduced to 12 TB Inj The liability has been optimized for a large number of disks and fans s 'activate appropriate.

A Google data center cooled seawater

Google released a video on YouTube showing the cooling system of its data center in Finland EUR 200 million located in Hamina. It has the particularity of using sea water The building was abandoned as a paper search engine has been converted. The pipes supplying water in the sea was thus already laid.

He simply used a small submarine to ensure they were not blocked. The result is impressive because Google did not need to install an air conditioning and in addition to preserving the environment, significant cost savings. This is the first time to our knowledge, a data center is cooled with seawater According to the story of Google, seawater is pumped from the Gulf of Finland.

Cray adopts NVIDIA's GPUs XK6

The manufacturer Cray announced its XK6 a hybrid supercomputer based on AMD Opteron 6200 and also using cards from NVIDIA Tesla 20. According to Cray, this type of modular architecture could reach a capacity of more than 50 PFLOPs. Running Linux, the XK6 comes with a set of programming tools for using all the resources of this hybrid supercomputer.

It is the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) should be the first customer to use a Cray XK6, by updating their XE6m acuel. The manufacturer finally indicates that the supercomputer should be available from the second half of the year.

• Cray launches XK6 "hybrid" supercomputer, 50 petaflops on tap (24/05/2011)
• Cray Rolls Out XK6 Hybrid, Scalable to 50 Petaflops (24/05/2011)
• Cray's XK6 super kicks out Opterons for Nvidia GPUs (24/05/2011)
• Cray XK6 supercomputer smashes petaflop record, humbly calls itself a 'general-purpose' machine (25/05/2011)
• Cray Debuts GPU-augmented Supercomputers (24/05/2011)

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D-Wave One: The first quantum computer is for sale

There is a little over four years, D-Wave had Orion processor "quantum" qubits and consisting of 16 supposed to be marketed. The manufacturer had also conducted a demonstration in the wake of a "quantum computer", an experiment at the time challenged by a number of academics. It must be said that the difficulties in developing a quantum computer are numerous: operating temperature of the processor slightly above absolute zero, superconducting materials and magnetic fields are essential to the development of such a computer, not counting the phenomenon of decoherence, which complicates the development of a quantum computer.

SAP strengthens its presence in the Cloud

Dell and Amazon as new partners, SAP embraces the Cloud, opens to new audiences, and expands its strategy in the cloud. With the reshuffling of the cloud generated by SAP reinvents itself and seeks new business models to his heart craft: ERP. The company has announced during his keynote at Sapphire Orlando two partnerships quite revealing.

Signed the first partnership with Dell, is the culmination of many months of R & D and provides users with portability offers SAP platform DELL VIS Data Center next generation. The University of Kentucky has revealed she would migrate its entire SAP platform Cloud on servers managed by DELL.

What does it take to power the Cloud?

Depends on the Cloud data centers (Data Centers) energy guzzlers. Their modernization is now essential to reduce the energy bill. A graphic summarizes the current situation and future prospects ... AAB, an American company that develops automation technologies to improve energy efficiency while reducing environmental impact, has just completed a very educational graphic that puts into perspective the consumption Current Cloud and its cumbersome infrastructure.

Bull supercomputer for Japanese nuclear

There are some coincidences that would have probably preferred to avoid. While Japan through the most serious nuclear crisis in its history (or even history), CEA (Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique French) and AJEA (Japan Agency for Nuclear Energy), mandated by F4E, just select the builder of the future supercomputer for research into controlled nuclear fusion which will be located in Japan.

Facebook's servers are "open"

Facebook has just announced an interesting initiative: Open Compute Project. The idea is to show that the strategy "server" of the company is effectively using non-standard solutions. In fact, Facebook does not - how to Google - the standard server, but built a new range of products to host their website, one of the worlds most visited.

Facebook's solution is unusual and thought for a site like this, with a sizable cost optimization. First point, the servers are "1.5 U" through the antrum and classical 1U 2U of "blades". Second, the server power itself is 450 W, 12 V works internally and is connected to two power sources: an AC, classical, the other continuously.

Cloud in Toyota

Microsoft and Toyota have announced a partnership to use the Windows Azure Cloud platforms Redmond in hybrid and electric cars the Japanese manufacturer. The two companies would invest $ 12 million (approx. EUR 8.5 million) in the Japanese subsidiary Toyota Media Service. They hope to commercialize the entire platform in 2015, but the first fruits should appear within a year or two.

The information we have today are obviously very vague, but the companies are talking about a technology solution that combines mobile communications and GPS systems and power management. Imagine a car that accesses the Cloud connected user where would its multimedia files, diary, and other important information.

The Xen hypervisor goes into version 4.1

After 11 months of development and nearly 1900 amendments, the Xen hypervisor is now available in final version 4.1. Xen is a free software as a reminder of (para) virtualization to run multiple operating systems on one physical machine, each guest OS with access to host resources. Supports configurations with more than 255 processors - organized into "pools" - and memory pages 1 GB / 2 MB, this new version also has a scheduler next generation (credit2) improving performance with low overhead operations latency operations such as audio or network.

SGI Altix UV: 256 Xeon in a server

The race for server density has reached a new milestone: the SGI Altix UV1000 can earn 256 Intel Xeon 7500 or a maximum of 2048 physical hearts. These CPUs are mounted in 128 dual-processor blades in 4 cabinets. They provide a theoretical power aggregated $ 18.5 TFlops. SGI associate them to 16 TB of RAM and up to 16 hard drives 2.5 "SAS (1.2 TB maximum).

SGI is proud to compare its Altix 1000 UV competitive offerings from HP or IBM servers, HP x86 embark up to 64 CPUs, IBM's 96.

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Altix (wikipedia)  Ultraviolet (wikipedia)  Xeon (wikipedia)  

480 cores in a 2U

A few weeks ago we told you about a server-based Atom that contained 512 cores (1024 threads) in a 10U server. The company Calxeda specializing in ARM chips, plans to do better: 480 cores in a 2U server. Calxeda is a company founded in 2008 which decided to offer ARM chips in servers. The advantage is obvious: the amount of energy consumed is very low with ARM SoC and it is a huge advantage for servers and storage for everything that does not require enormous computing power.

Sales of servers: IBM and HP dominate

According to figures just released by the institute Gartner, the server market would have risen 16.4% between the fourth quarter 2009 and fourth quarter 2010, reaching 14.68 billion dollars. IBM consolidates its leading position with 35.5% market share, while HP is still second with 30.4%. After Dell (13.1%), Oracle (5.5% market share, down 16.2%) and Fujitsu (3.8%).

In terms of volume, it is HP remains the leader with more than 767,000 units sold during the fourth quarter (+6.9%) against 515,274 units for Dell and "only" 332,254 servers for IBM. We note in passing that Oracle saw its shipments of servers to contract by 40.8%, with only 36,614 servers sold.

The largest machine that man in Jeopardy

The final round of Jeopardy winner with Watson has spent $ 77.147, against $ 24 000 to Ken Jennings and $ 21 600 Brad Rutter. We report the details of the first leg in our current "Jeopardy: man vs. machine." We left Watson, the IBM system has tied with Brad Rutter. The second and third rounds were won handily by the machine that has dominated its competitors.

Specifically, Big Blue has shown the most advanced artificial intelligence that he had ever seen in public. The system was fast and very often right. He had some difficulties with puns or innuendo, which shows that the machines are still many limitations to overcome. However, the greatest weakness of Watson was probably the lack of a sense of humor.

Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine

For the first time, an IBM computer against the best players in the first inning and Jeopardy holds man and machine tie. IBM prepares the game for years. It puts forward Watson, a system of artificial intelligence capable of understanding a question and answer (see "A computer will play Jeopardy"). The task is difficult because not only must understand the syntax, but the wordplay and the complexity of the issues that are given, search through its database to output the correct answer.