Team Costa Rica is another first-time entrant in the 2011 Student Cluster Competition. Their official name is Tecnológico de Costa Rica, but to me they’re the Rainforest Eagles, and they’ve earned respect for not only representing their entire region but…

The University of Colorado Buffalo team has competed at every Student Cluster Competition – this is year six. The 2011 team is packed with veterans; almost every member has been to the big cluster dance before. Team Buffalo is driving…

China’s NUDT (National University of Defense Technology) shocked the world in 2010 when they unveiled the fastest supercomputer known to man, the 1.86 Pflop Tianhe-1A. It came out of nowhere and caught the entire industry by surprise. Team China, sponsored…

Boston U brought more than a taste for clam chowder to the 2011 Student Cluster Competition; they also brought more hardware heft than anyone else. Their four-node, dual-socket AMD Interlagos-based cluster has a grand total of 336 cores – 80…

Rich Brueckner and I sat down this morning with Jack Dongarra and Hans Meuer from Top500.org, the guys who put together the twice yearly list of the 500 largest supercomputers. The resulting webcast (available here) revealed a number of interesting…

We’ve seen a lot of ARM server activity in recent weeks. ARM chip upstart Calxeda announced both their 5-watt EnergyCore ARM chip (breakdown here) and a partnership with x86 giant HP (outlined here). The ARM architecture is also getting a much necessary, but painfully slow, 64-bit makeover, slated to roll out in 2014.

ARM processors use much less power than even the stingiest x86 chip, which is much of the reason why many tout them as the answer for massive web serving infrastructures. But for rigorous enterprise and HPC (high performance computing) processing chores, ARM simply doesn’t get it done. The 32-bit versions can’t address enough memory, and there isn’t enough oomph in the ARM chip and instruction set to compete with mainstream x86 processors on server-like chores.