During a two-week spate of travel, I managed to schedule a meeting at the Bay Area offices of analytics firebrands Revolution Analytics. Outwardly, their facilities were pretty conventional, and no one called me ‘comrade’ even once. However, what they showed me over the next couple of hours sparked my imagination and even a bit of revolutionary fervor.

I’m convinced that the next ‘big thing’ in commercial computing is going to be predictive analytics. The trend is a response to fundamental changes in the global economic infrastructure. Briefly, what I see is that globalization – coupled with advances in manufacturing and distribution – has put almost all of the power into the hands of buyers, not suppliers. I’ve written about this in The Reg and other places; here’s a taste.

The guys at upstart Revolution Analytics could be key players in this trend. They’ve taken the open source R statistical programming language, enhanced it, and packaged it in a user-friendly wrapper.

The April 15^th team application deadline for the SC11 Student Cluster Competition (SCC) is fast approaching. The SCC pits eight university teams from around the globe against one another in Seattle (site of SC11) to compete for clustering glory.

Sponsors supply the equipment and advice, but it’s the students who learn the systems and applications, put together their competition strategies, and bring it all together in a quest to make their systems perform better than their competitors’ – and drink deeply from the chalice of victory. (There isn’t an actual SCC Chalice of Victory, but maybe I’ll see if I can pick one up. Send me a link if you see a good one online.) (Read more below…)

Like most everyone, I’ve been glued to the coverage of the Japanese earthquakes, the tsunami and the unfolding catastrophic aftermath. The cost in human terms is incalculable, and the economic costs will probably top those of any other single event.

The problems at Japan’s nuclear plants quickly became the overriding story this past weekend. This is understandable, I guess, given the fact that our society has been trained to react with horror at the thought of even a rad of radiation being released into the atmosphere.

The ultimate competition for student techies has begun. Well, the beginning step has: submissions for the 2011 Student Cluster Competition (SCC) are now open. The SCC is the ultimate challenge pitting student teams against hardware, software, electricity, heat, and each other. This year, the SCC committee is planning to invite eight teams to put it all on the line in Seattle, live at SC11.

At the Supercomputing Conference, teams from universities around the world build clusters that will run a set of HPC workloads and solve problems as quickly and accurately as possible. Equipment is borrowed from team sponsors, who will also help teams meet their other expenses, such as travel.

Bigger is better in pastries, paychecks and bank accounts, but not in electronics. A recent story in HPCwire caught my interest and got me thinking about what the end of the shrink road might portend – and the potential alternatives.

The ability to steadily shrink the size of the processor brains that drive computers – and pretty much everything else – has driven computer performance since the advent of the microprocessor.

But now that we’re at 32nm and moving toward 16nm and even 14nm (see Intel’s recent announcement), we don’t have all that many nm to go until we hit the limits of what’s possible under the laws of physics. When you get too small, you can run into problems at atomic scale.

SeaMicro just announced their newest ultra-dense, ultra-low power Atom-based server solution. Our pal TPM gives it full coverage in this Reg article, but here’s the basic story:

Their first system, the SM10000, crammed eight Atom single-core processors and 16GB of memory onto a 5” x 11” system board and combined 64 of these boards along with switches, fans, and space for 64 drives into a single 10U chassis. All in, the system supports a grand total of 512 server images.

The new box, cleverly named the SM10000-64, is essentially the same thing, but with a significant upgrade at the server board level.

You know how when you call a help desk or customer service number they have that short ‘this call may be recorded’ message? Have you ever wondered what they do with the recordings?

I always figured they played them at company parties as jokes, or that they had ‘Can you top this?’ contests with one another: “Okay, get this: Last week this guy calls saying his printer is printing too light. I told him it’s an o/s and hard drive problem, and to call me back after he reformatted C: and reinstalled Windows… ha ha ha…”

While I’m absolutely positive that much of that kind of thing happens, there are also some folks doing smart things with this data. A recent Forbes article explains how ELoyalty, a smallish provider of call center gear, has come up with a way to categorize callers into six distinct personality types and then match them to a staffer with the same personality.

Security is probably the biggest factor keeping enterprises from moving more applications and data to public clouds. I’d argue that security is just one (albeit a hugely important one) of the reasons why public clouds will exist as a tool for data centers – rather than the default usage model – for the foreseeable future.

However, according to IBM CTO of Cloud Computing Harold Moss, clouds aren’t anything to be worried about from a security standpoint.

In this blog, IBM’er Steve Hamm lays out Moss’s case. Here’s a taste:

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