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‘Blue Gene’ supercomputer breaks speed record
With performance almost double that of the Earth Simulator, in Yokohama, Japan, IBM’s Blue Gene/L was officially ranked first on the Top500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers. IBM built four of the top ten machines on the biannual list.
Blue Gene/L is a 33,000-processor prototype of a much larger $100 million system that will be delivered to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, during the first half of 2005. The system is capable of performing 70.72 trillion calculations per second, making it the first new system to top the list since NEC’s Earth Simulator first appeared in 2002.
When fully assembled at Lawrence Livermore, Blue Gene/L will be a 130,000-processor system with an estimated peak performance of 360 teraflops, according to IBM. A teraflop is one trillion calculations per second.
In second place for Top500 ranking is the 10,240-processor Columbia supercomputer, built by Silicon Graphics (SGI) for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, in Mountain View, California. With a benchmarked performance of 51.87 teraflops, it easily beat out the Earth Simulator, which was measured at 35.86 teraflops.
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University reappeared on the list, finishing in seventh position five months after dropping off the last list, issued in June, because of a hardware upgrade to Apple Computer’s Xserve systems. Virginia Tech’s SuperMac system reported a benchmark of 12.25 teraflops.
Novell ships new Linux version
Novell offer a new desktop version of Linux for its enterprise customers, the company announced.
The company said that this desktop version, which will begin shipping on November 12th, is built on its SuSE Linux technology and will cost a suggested $50 a seat from Novell’s channel partners. The price will include upgrades and updates for one year.
According to Novell, the new offering includes the Novell version of the Open Office productivity suite, Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser, collaboration client Novell Evolution and integration with Novell’s ZENworks Linux Management, which allows system administrators to manage Linux desktops remotely.
“Novell Linux Desktop is not about the wholesale replacement of Windows systems, but rather it’s about identifying where and when an open-source desktop can be a sensible, cost-effective alternative,” Novell CEO Jack Messman said.
“The time is now for specific desktop users to reap the benefits of open source.”
New Internet Explorer hole
Microsoft is investigating reports of a serious security flaw in Internet Explorer, but has not yet seen malicious code that exploits the reported flaw, the company said today.
Security experts earlier this week warned that code exploiting a newly discovered security hole in IE is circulating on the Internet. The code exploits a buffer overflow vulnerability in IE 6 and has been confirmed on PCs running Windows XP with Service Pack 1 and Windows 2000, according to Danish Security company Secunia.
The US Computer Emergency Readiness Team issued an alert similar to the Secunia advisory. CERT warns that aside from the Web browser, applications such as e-mail clients that rely on browser controls may also be vulnerable. Attackers could gain complete control over a victim’s computer by exploiting the flaw, according to Secunia and CERT.
Microsoft is investigating the possible vulnerability, the company says in a statement. However, while Secunia and CERT are raising an alarm over code exploiting the vulnerability being publicly available, Microsoft says it has not seen that yet. “We have not been made aware of any active exploits of the reported vulnerabilities or customer impact at this time, but we are aggressively investigating the public reports,” the company says.
Indian cellphone industry booms
Mobile phone users have outstripped traditional landline connections in India, the government announced.
Some 44.5 million Indians now use mobile handsets, compared with the 43.9 million existing landline users, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India said in a statement.
“And thus the number of mobile subscribers has now crossed fixed telephony subscribers in the country,” the regulator said, following the addition of 1.2 million cellular telephone users since April.
According to US-based investment bank Morgan Stanley, India’s mobile market is expected to grow at a compound average rate of 40 per cent until 2007.
An industry survey predicts that at least 110 million new mobile phone subscribers will be added during the next three years in India, where call rates are slashed frequently because of cut-throat competition between rival service providers. — Sci-tech World Report
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