OK, I’m a sucker for anything that does something a lot faster – even if I don’t quite understand how it does it. So I have to blog a least a little bit about IBM’s recent announcement; they’ve lit a fire under the task of assessing data quality with a newly patented (and presumably shiny) algorithm. What got my attention was this result:  Using this new method, they were able to accurately validate 9TB of data in 20 minutes  – as opposed the 24 hours plus that traditional methods would have taken on the same hardware.

That’s pretty sporty performance, in my mind,

There hasn’t been a lot of talk yet from Oracle about their plans for HPC now that the Sun purchase has been consummated. From what I can tell, it’s not that Oracle is necessarily holding anything back; it’s more that their approach to the market is still being shaped up. The big job was getting the systems roadmaps in place and communicated to the world – and there still are some who will argue that Oracle hasn’t been clear enough on that issue.

However: it looks like almost all HPC-related content has disappeared from the Oracle website.

The people have spoken: Barbie will become a computer engineer. And a news reporter.

Results of the 2009 Barbie Global Career Survey – called the ‘Girls’ Vote’ on the results announcement page – swung in favor of ‘News Anchor.’ But the ‘Popular Vote’ conducted online during the last month and promoted here has delivered geek glory: Computer Engineer Barbie. Hell yeah.

The chip story coming out of Monday’s Power7 unveiling from IBM is bigger than usual. They are, of course, doing plenty of the requisite feeds and speeds chest-beating, but there is a broader message that they are directing at a wider audience. (For a highly detailed discussion of the new Power7 chip and some historical context, our pal Timothy Prickett Morgan wrote a great article here.)

IBM is closely tying the Power7 chip and systems launches to their Smarter Planet initiative, which is the company’s overarching theme du jour. Smarter Planet is their answer to the question, “How can technology solve the world’s problems?”

In their marathon webcast extravaganza last week, Oracle had a lot to say about the types of customers they’re looking for and how they’re going to sell stuff to them. The overarching themes that we heard over and over again as they laid out their forthcoming value proposition were “Enterprise,” “Mission-critical,” and “Integrated.” The ‘old’ Sun used to talk about this same game, but with a very large, heaping helping of Web 2.0, new app developers, and utility computing. We didn’t hear much, if any, of that stuff from Oracle – which is a good thing, since concentrating on those markets only served to drive Sun into the ground in terms of sales and profitability.