Our friends at insideHPC pushed this story recently, but there hasn’t been an accompanying groundswell of buzz, so I’m attempting to get the ball rolling.  Mattel, purveyor of the iconic Barbie doll, is running a contest to decide Barbie’s next career. She has quite a wide range of choices for her new job: surgeon, architect, environmentalist, news anchor, and computer engineer.

In the wake of the Google vs. China dustup, we’re starting to see some discussion of the greater implications for computing, both in general and the cloudy Google way. The fact that at least a few Gmail accounts were accessed by hackers looking for dissidents is bound to raise some questions about the security of Gmail specifically and the entire cloud model as well.

For my part, I’ve always felt that security was – and is – one of the biggest concerns with the entire cloud concept.

The recently combined Rackable/SGI is looking to add some new blood to their depleted partner ranks. After the merger, the company dropped about one-third of their combined partners for various reasons and is now trying to rebuild their channel presence. They’re looking for folks who have both enterprise and HPC chops – which makes sense, given their product set and strategy. You can read about it here.

SGI isn’t in an enviable position right now.

Rationality has prevailed: the European Union has finally approved of Oracle’s $7.4bn acquisition of Sun Microsystems. The primary roadblock was concern over the long-term future of MySQL which, I guess, means that having a free relational database is somehow a human right (at least in the EU). However, it seems that Oracle’s ’10-Point Commitment’ has assuaged fears that MySQL and its community will be subsumed or squashed.

Oracle’s plans for Java and the Java Community Process (JCP) have also been a hot topic of speculation, but the general consensus now is that no major changes are in the works. Sure, Oracle could change the rules so that only Oracle software is Java-compliant, use their veto power to their own competitive advantage, etc… but we just don’t see it. It’s too self-defeating. There’s every reason to think that they’ll manage Java and the JCP at least as well as Sun did.

Oracle will be hosting a 5-hour (!) webcast on Wednesday, January 27 that promises to clear up a lot of the details about their plans going forward. We’ll be watching and maybe even providing some running commentary along the way.

What does the finalization of this deal mean to the industry?

Anyone even glancing at the tech news today has to be aware of what has transpired between China and Google over the past 24 hours. Briefly, Google has discovered that China-based hackers have systematically attacked Google’s infrastructure, primarily aiming at the gmail accounts of Chinese dissidents and human rights activists both in China and around the world. China has denied that the hackers were government-supported, but I find that hard to believe. Here’s a full rundown of the story so far. Right now, Google is evaluating their options, with the thought that perhaps leaving China altogether might be the best course.

This standoff between Google and the People’s Republic of China is a big, big deal. It has ramifications for Google, of course, but also much broader implications.

If you build a supercomputer out of Atom chips, will someone buy it? That remains to be seen, but it’s a compelling enough idea to score $9.3 million from the U.S. Department of Energy. You can click here to read about SeaMicro, a small company that picked up the dough to develop an Atom-based supercomputer. The story describes a system composed of 512 Atom procs with a petabyte of ‘storage’…  which probably means disk, but could also refer to aggregated memory. There isn’t a lot of information on the system at this point – SeaMicro’s website is Spartan to say the least.  However, it’s said that this system would cost less than $100k and have extremely low power requirements.

I got a call recently from a reporter who confronted me with an interesting question. He had attended SC04 in Pittsburgh, and one of his key takeaways from the show was that retailing was on the cusp of adopting HPC-style computing to crunch their data in order to improve both top-line and bottom-line results. He asked me:  “Has HPC made it into retailing?” and followed up with “If not, why not?” and “If so, what are they getting out of it?”

One of the big threads running through SC09 last year was giving users more flexibility in how they configure systems to attack various workloads. At the show, we took a look at three different companies who are, in one way or another, providing large system images. (Click to see our posts on ScaleMP, 3Leaf, and SGI.)

One company we didn’t get a chance to talk to at SC09 is RNA networks, a Portland, Oregon-based start-up that has a unique take on pasting together small commodity hardware to give it big iron capabilities. Over the holidays, we ventured downtown to RNA’s headquarters and spent some time with Product Manager Don Whitehead. As we sat down to meet, the steady rain had somehow turned to heavy snow, but we didn’t anticipate any problems driving – surely it wasn’t going to stick.

The introduction of the Google Nexus One ‘super phone’ has fired a shot across the bow of every cell phone service provider, but perhaps none more than Apple, purveyors of the iPhone or – as some call it – “The…