One of my very favorite industry events is coming up next week – the NVIDIA-organized GPU Technology Conference, aka GTC 2012. I’ve been in the tech industry for almost 20 years; roughly half that time was spent working for The Man in vendor firms, and the other half at my own boutique industry analyst firm. Not surprisingly, I’ve been to a lot of vendor-sponsored conferences. I’ve helped organize some and have had speaking slots at quite a few, so I know the drill.

But the GTC isn’t a typical vendor conference. It’s way different and, in my opinion, the best vendor event in the industry today. If not ever. Why? (Read more below…)

When it comes to Big Data, I’m as geeked out as the next guy – if not a little more so. For the last three years or so, I’ve been telling anyone who will listen (and plenty of people who won’t) that Big Data and enterprise analytics are the ‘next big thing’ both in business and computing. Today, it’s widely accepted that Big Data is going to make making big changes to our world.

But not everyone is on the bus. Or if they’re on the bus, they’re not entirely sure that it’s headed in the right direction. An article in Datanami summarizes an MIT Technology Review interview with Dr. Peter Fader, co-director of the Wharton School of Business, in which the good doctor tosses cold water on some of the most hallowed Big Data precepts. (Read more below…)

There isn’t anything inherently evil about industry standard benchmarks, just as there isn’t anything inherently evil about guns. You know the saying: “Guns don’t kill people – people kill people.” (What about bullets? No, they’re not inherently evil either.)

But in the hands of motivated vendors, benchmarks are weapons to be wielded against competitors with great gusto. So why am I writing about benchmarks? It’s because the Transaction Processing Council (TPC) has released a new major benchmark, TPC-DS, which aims to provide a level playing field for vendors warring over their Big Data prowess. (Read more below…)

Multicore processors drive everything these days from the biggest HPC cluster to the lowliest tablet – even smart phones. While parallel programming has come quite a way, there are still many apps that aren’t well-behaved at all. They’re the worst kind of houseguests – acting like they own the whole damned house while paying absolutely no attention to the needs of other residents.

They’ll grab more memory than they need and never let it go. They’ll spawn enough threads to crowd out everyone else; it’s like they’ve invited their deadbeat friends over to watch the Super Bowl at your house and eat all your snacks. Operating systems and virtualization mechanisms attempt to control unruly apps, but they don’t have the ability to completely control and prioritize system resources. (Read more below…)

This is one of those stories that just makes me grin and giggle (not a simpering, girlish giggle, but a strong, manly giggle). In their latest display of technical hackery, MIT students built a Tetris game that uses an entire building as the game board. Kevin Fogarty has the story with embedded video here. (Read more below…)

In a bold and unexpected move, Intel bought out rights to Cray’s networking and interconnect technology a couple of days ago for $140 million in cold, hard cash. Like our pal TPM said in his comprehensive story here, it was quite a surprise to HPC industry watchers. I hadn’t heard speculation about Cray looking to sell any assets. In fact, given the recent introduction of their Big Data play, YarcData, I had expected any Cray M&A news to be about their acquisition of some analytics pieces to round out their offerings.

(The name “YarcData” reminds me of the sound I heard late one night when a coyote surprised a duck. Yeah, I get it: ‘Yarc’ is Cray spelled backwards. That’s a nice touch, I guess, but I don’t understand why they wouldn’t use the Cray name for this new division. Cray has been synonymous with advanced technology, supercomputing, and the like since its origin in 1972. That’s forty years – longer if you factor in Seymour Cray’s years with Control Data in the 1960s.) (Read more below…)

The UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is looking to gift the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (the bad Korea) with a little over $50k worth of hardware and peripherals, plus some training, with the goal of modernizing North Korea’s patent and trademark applications.

Really? That’s what’s highest on North Korea’s IT wish list these days? Yep, it is… and for good reason. (Read more below…)

An article in The Wall Street Journal last Friday shined a bit of light on China’s entry into the upper echelon of supercomputing nations over the past few years. In 2007, China had only 10 systems on the Top500 list. But like TV’s George Jefferson adding dry cleaning stores, China has been movin’ on up…  they now have 74 of the top boxes.

When Jefferson moved into that dee-luxe apartment in the sky, he constantly hatched schemes to thwart his business and personal rivals – much like what the Western world believes China will do with their new supercomputing prowess. The parallels are eerie.

The WSJ story points out that supercomputers in China are often used for local, non-supercomputing tasks rather than the ambitious basic research that these systems typically do in the rest of the world.  But there’s another side of the Chinese supercomputing surge – it looks like HPC is rapidly becoming a cool pursuit for China’s university students. (Read more below…)

When I wrote this blog about how a recent research study correlated social network behavior with employee success, I speculated that we’d soon see employers trying to circumvent Facebook’s privacy policies in order to get a good look at your Facebook pages.

Well, it turns out that some employers aren’t happy with just seeing the public part of applicant profiles; they’re actually asking prospective employees to turn over their Facebook login and password. Wait, did I get that right? (Looks again…) Yeah, I did. They’re outright asking applicants to give them their Facebook login details as part of the interview screening process. (Read more below…)

Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. has announced that after 250 years, it’s throwing in the towel on print editions and moving to all-digital delivery of alphabetized facts and figures.

Encyclopaedia Britannica was a touchstone of my youth. You couldn’t go to a state fair or school event without seeing someone seated at a table next to a tall stack of books – books that held, in my mind, every fact worth knowing. (Read more below…)