Gore says supercomputing can be killer app in climate change
Former Vice President Al Gore told an audience at SC09 that supercomputers can be used to show the world how climate change is affecting the earth. Read more...

Supercomputing centers acknowledge Amazon influence

Georgia Tech supercomputer powered by graphics processors

Japan may back out of fastest-supercomputer project

Supercomputers with 100 million cores coming by 2018

Two rival supercomputers duke it out for top spot

The Smithsonian's quest for IT's ruby slippers

China claims supercomputer among world's fastest

Survey revives debate over the future of the mainframe

NICS joins petaflop supercomputer club

More Mainframes and Supercomputers Stories

The 11 most influential microprocessors of all time
From the brains of the Voyager space mission to the inspiration for modern CPUs, here are the chips that built our modern technological culture.

Now Departing: Union Pacific's 40-Year-Old Mainframe
Union Pacific, the railroad company that transports chemicals, coal, food, minerals and automobiles in and around 23 Western U.S. states, has had two workhorses that toiled tirelessly for the past four decades: the diesel locomotive and the IBM mainframe.

Things CIOs Must Know About Mainframe Modernization
1. Mainframe shops have to make decisions: whether to migrate to other platforms, add service-oriented architecture (SOA) interfaces or rewrite applications. With a half-baked strategy, IT winds up "bolting on all sorts of unusual, often architecturally inelegant" work-arounds, argues John B. Rabon, manager of legacy modernization at Aflac. "We saw this happening. You hit this wall of unintended consequences." Aflac is now 60 percent finished with a major conversion initiative.

Swine flu spreads, Apple hires, Twitter hack
Hands down, the swine-flu outbreak captured the headlines this week (and led to some obviously hysterically hyped headlines along the way). Amid the speculation about how much havoc the new virus will wind up wreaking on the world, there also was some more moderated speculation about what Apple is up to in hiring a bunch of chip designers. Oh, and another high-profile Twitter account was hacked ... again.

Need a supercomputer? This guy builds them himself
Bruce Allen is perhaps the world's best do-it-yourselfer. When he needed a supercomputer to crunch the results of gravitational-wave research, he built one with his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

College dropout is one-man IT shop — at college lab
Meet Justin King -- the one-man IT shop. At the five-year-old Human Neuroimaging Laboratory at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, IT plays a key role in innovative research involving functional magnetic resonance imaging machines.

Supercomputer race: It's a tricky task to boost (and measure) system speed
Now that supercomputing's petaflops barrier has been broken, the next goal is obvious. Unless, that is, the Top500 list is getting ahead of reality.

Five movies starring computers
Five movies that feature computers and programs as part of the cast.

Supercomputer helps with cancer research
Designing new cancer drugs requires an understanding of the structure of proteins, with more than 90 million images to analyze and interpret.

Q&A: What Roadrunner's petaflop Top500 milestone is all about
The Top500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers passed a milestone Wednesday with the first system to achieve peak performance of 1 petaflop, or one quadrillion floating point operations per second. Erich Strohmaier, a computer scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, was one of the founding editors of the Top500 list back in 1993. He talked with IDG News Service about the performance gains the list has seen, the quad-core processors that are coming to dominate it and mistakes that can creep in when the list is put together.

Editors' Picks

Getting to know Windows 7? Don't stop now: From speeding up taskbar thumbnails to reining in UAC, here are 20 ways to make Windows 7 act the way you want. Is Motorola's new Droid good enough to vanquish iPhone envy? To find out, we took it on a 3-day trip. Sure, you could always use Linux as a desktop OS, but Corel Linux 1.0 was the first distro designed for ordinary users. It's been a long, strange trip since then. New touch-screen laptops from Fujitsu, HP and Lenovo take advantage of Microsoft Windows 7's touch-friendly infrastructure.

hot topics

Get the latest news, reviews and more about Microsoft's newest desktop operating system.

• Apple
• Microsoft
• Google
• iPhone
• Mac A to Z

special report topics

General Mills, Genentech, San Diego Gas & Electric, University of Pennsylvania and Monsanto top the list.

"With all the industry buzz around disk based data protection and deduplication, many companies are rethinking their current investments in..." Read more "After applying some updates to a Windows 2003 virtual server, this pilot fish comes in the next morning to find..." Read more "Self service, drag and drop application provisioning store, combined with desktop personalization features, give end users more control of their..." Read more More Servers & Data Center Blogs See all Computerworld Blogs