As spring turns into summer, we get – like clockwork – a new Top500 list. While there’s plenty of analysis yet to be done, what’s getting lots of press (NYT story here, in-depth HPCwire story here) is how the Chinese National Supercomputing Center has captured the number two slot on the list with their 1.27 petaflop (sustained), 4,640 GPU monster box. This system is noteworthy not only from a performance standpoint, but also because it relies so heavily on NVIDIA GPUs, further confirming a trend toward hybrid CPU/GPU computing.

Much of the attention will be focused on the big move that China, Inc. has made on the list. There are two China-based systems in the top ten, and they own fully 24 systems in the Top500. In total performance, this puts China behind only the U.S. as a supercomputing powerhouse. There is speculation that by this time next year, China is going to be rolling out a new, all-China-designed supercomputer that might be the fastest in the world.

An interesting story a few days ago from our pals Cade and TPM at The Register put forward some interesting theories about how Google’s activities and acquisitions of companies and talent might add up to the searcher building its own server chip. (Their story is here.)

Plausible? Yeah, I think it might be. We’re not talking about a chip designed to compete with the highly sophisticated Xeon or Power processors. But doing their own customized ARM implementation? It could make a lot of sense, given Google’s scale and internal needs.

IBM pushed out some more of their “Workload Optimized” offerings last week with the introduction of analytic packages based on their mainframe and x86 systems. These bundles join the previously announced Power system bundle that they rolled out late last spring. What they’re doing here is combining IBM hardware with a full slate of Cognos and InfoSphere Warehouse software into a pre-integrated bundle that will, assumedly, allow customers to cut deployment time and get cracking on some serious data crunching. Our pal Timothy Prickett Morgan wrote it all up here.

Looking at the bigger picture, I think a lot of action is going to be centered on the enterprise analytics space in the coming years. It’s not technology pushing it; it’s macroeconomics. It’s just getting harder and harder for businesses to profitably compete. Globalization and the instant communications afforded by the web have made the world a much smaller place, although I’d still hate to have to paint it.

Recently, we shared some preliminary results from our annual x86 enterprise user survey. The topic of that article was the economy, and what it’s done to our survey respondents’ 2010 IT budgets. You can see that article here and take the survey yourself here.

Now we’re taking a look at a sampling of the qualitative answers we received in the survey when we gave the respondents a chance to tell us about the good, the bad, and the just plain stupid attempts to cut costs. As you’ll see, these plans are ill-fated due to a combination of short-term thinking, utter incompetence, and probably a heaping helping of toadying as well.

The ideal client computing solution doesn’t yet exist. The traditional model is very expensive, requiring lots of troubleshooting and 1×1 support to keep users up and running. Left uncontrolled, users will add more applications or inevitably use their systems for both work and personal tasks. This anarchy leads to more system problems and thus more support. Organizations typically try to minimize these problems by locking down the PC configuration – sort of the old-style Soviet Politburo approach, which leads to unhappy users burning effigies of CIOs.

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?”