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?”

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.

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 One True Phone.” iPhone users, like Mac users, often are not just customers; they are devoted evangelists of all things Apple.  This video is sure to piss them off in a huge way… which, hopefully, will prompt iPhone zealots to fire back with everything they have. Nothing we love better than a bitter flame war…

HPC news and developments slack off a lot during the holidays – as does the GCG staff. The lull often lasts well into January as we put the holiday season behind us, take down the tree, and exchange our geeky gifts for even geekier and more powerful gifts… but that won’t stop us from writing something HPC-related.

In our never-ending quest to find interesting stuff to write about, we stumbled upon “The Physics of Santa Claus”.

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