Battle to build the biggest supercomputer

SCIENTISTS HAVE unveiled a new generation of supercomputers, including a £30m machine with the memory of 200,000 home computers and a hard disk hefty enough to hold the entire Google index of the Internet.

The huge devices, each costing tens of millions of pounds, will compete against each other this year for the title of the planet's biggest electronic brains.

The first contender, Constellation, has been built by Sun Microsystems at a cost of $59m and boasts a 1.7 petabytes hard disk. It was unveiled at the International Supercomputer conference in Dresden, Germany.

The machine - which will go live later this year - can operate at speeds of 421 teraflops, or 421 trillion calculations a second. This will outstrip IBM's 280 Teraflop Blue Gene/L, currently ranked as the world's fastest computer, by some distance. But operating at such levels will be a significant power drain, requiring the same amount of power to run as a high-speed intercity train.

Despite the immense cost, officials said that high-powered computers were now more powerful and less expensive than ever before. "We have reached unprecedented cost performance for scientific computing," said Andreas Bechtolsheim, chief archi- tect and co-founder of Sun.

The first Constellation computer, called Ranger, will be installed at the University of Texas in order to assist scientists and engineers with running incredibly complex calculations. But although Constellation will put Sun back at the top table of hitech computing along with names such as Cray and IBM, its reign as the most powerful machine on the planet is likely to be short-lived.

IBM also took the stage in Dresden to announce its forthcoming plan to build the latest Blue Gene computer, dubbed "P". It is expected to be almost three times more powerful than its predecessor.

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Microsoft logs on to Google complaint, to alter Vista

MICROSOFT agreed to make changes to its Windows Vista operating system in response to a complaint by Google that a feature of Vista is anticompetitive, lawyers involved in the case said.

The settlement, reached in recent days by state prosecutors, the Justice Department and Microsoft, averted the prospect of litigation over a complaint by Google that Vista had been designed to frustrate computer users who want to use software other than Microsoft's to search through files on their hard drives. Google had made its complaint confidentially as part of the consent decree proceedings set up to monitor Microsoft for any anticompetitive conduct after it settled a landmark antitrust lawsuit five years ago that had been brought by the states and the Clinton administration.

The federal government and the states were planning to file a joint status report by midnight on Tuesday in the consent decree proceedings that outlined the changes Microsoft would be making to Vista. State and federal lawyers were exchanging drafts of the report.

They said they had reached agreement on a remedy, al- though there was still some disagreement over the report's language. The disagreement reflected tensions between the Justice Department, which initially sided with Microsoft in the dispute, and some of the states, which have supported Goog1e and advocated a more aggressive stance.

Google has sought to keep a low profile in the dispute, in part because the Federal Trade Commission has recently opened a preliminary antitrust investigation into Google's proposed $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick, an online advertising company.

Lawyers involved in the proceeding said the changes to Vista would allow consumers to decide which desktop search program they want to use, and that selecting software from Google or some other company would no longer slow down the computer as it does now. They said that as part of the settlement, Microsoft would let Vista users know how to change their desktop search program. But the settlement would not require Microsoft to make all the changes that Google had sought.

Google maintained that its desktop search program was slowed by an equivalent feature that is built into Vista. When the Google and Microsoft search programs run simultaneously, their indexing programs slow the operating system considerably, Google contends. As a result, Google has said that Vista violated Microsoft's 2002 antitrust settlement, which prohibits Microsoft from designing operating systems that limit the choices of consumers.

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How to Choose a Cell Phone

Cellular phones have revolutionalized the way that we communicate with each other. Instant access to people, text messaging, picture taking, and game playing are all features that have changed the way that people use the cell phone.
Whether you're in the market for your first cell phone or your ninth, it is still a good idea to look at cell phone comparisons and do as much research as possible. After using several different brands of cellular phones, people tend to prefer one manufacturer over another. However, with so many new manufacturers entering the market, it is important to keep your options open. Usually, one company will beat the rest when marketing new features.read more...

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A virtual PC without a PC

IN A move to make PC usage simpler and to rid maintenance-related issues for users, Switzerland-based software company Nivio, a subsidiary of iNet Global Services, has launched a Windows operating system-based on online desktop service.

With this, a user can remotely access a Windows desktop from any web browser such as Internet Explorer without having to own a PC. "It is for users who do not want to be bothered with costs, constant technology changes and upgrades - whether it is a new operating system or security patches to combat PC viruses,"

Companies like Nivio, Novatium, Wyse, Sun Microsystems and PC manufacturers like HP are eying this space with ‘thin clients' - a small box that does not contain any software or computing power and can be accessed whenever required through the Internet or on a local area network.

"The advantage is that a user can use even a 486 PC, an obsolete model that is still used in many places in India," says Duggal. He explains that this is possible because computing happens in a central server through software that they have developed unlike normal PCs where the computing happens in the sys tem that the user is working on. This he reckons could resolve the issue of slow Internet speeds, which has been one of the hindrances in uptake of ‘thin client' devices in India.

With private equity backing from investment bankers from Duetche Bank, Unicredit Group and Goldman Sachs to the tune of $6 million, the company is targeting second tier cities and the vast student population in India. According to industry observers, about 60 per cent of students in India access internet or other computer programs from cyber cafes. This does not deter Duggal who has currently signed up 2,500 users and has plans to acquire one-lakh customers by the end of 2007.

EASY COMPUTING Companies like Nivio, Novatium, Wyse, Sun Microsystems and PC manufacturers like HP are eying this space with ‘thin clients' Thin clients is a small box that does not contain any software or computing power and can be accessed.

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