The U.S Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) might house the most powerful supercomputer in the world-- the Titan a machine able to work out to 20000 trillion calculations per second (or 20 petaflops). 

A Cray creation, the Titan contains 18688 nodes and 710 terabytes of memory. Interestingly enough, each node carries an Nvidia Tesla K20 GPU as well as a 16-core AMD Opteron 6274 processor, a nod at the current trend of using graphics hardware for non-graphics work. 

But is it truly the most powerful supercomputer in the world? Read more...

Two new Cable Cubby models are designed to complement the look of TouchLink TLP 350CV and TLP 710CV touchpanels.

The Extron TLE 350 and TLE 710 are durable, furniture-mountable metal housings for AV, data, and power connections. The enclosures' dimensions are identical to those of the TLP 350CV and TLP 710CV Cable Cubby TouchLink Touchpanels, creating an elegant, uniform installation when paired with these touchpanels in the same table.

When not being used, cables can be stored out of sight while remaining connected to the system, offering a discreet way to access cables and connection points as they are needed. The TLE 350 offers nine AAP openings and the TLE 710 offers eleven. These openings can be populated with a combination of Extron AAP modules and Extron Retractors. Both can be mounted securely into a tabletop, lectern, or other flat surface and are available in black anodized or brushed aluminum finishes. AC power modules are available for the US, Europe, and other major world markets. Read more...

Penguin Computing enters the low-power ARM-based server arena with the Ultimate Data X1 (UDX1)-- one of the first server platforms using the Calxeda EnergyCore System on a Chip (SoC). 

The Calxeda SoC carries a complete server with a low-power ARM processor, fabric switch and management software. Each server node uses only 5W of power and builds up a scaleable server infrastructure containing thousands of nodes. 

The EnergyCore ECX-1000 core at the heart of each server node is a 32-bit processor-- but Calxeda promises it will move to 64-bit processors Read more...

A mathematical paper paper from the 19th century might be the key for the future of data centres-- an era throwing away traditional switches and cables in favour of wire-free designs. 

Back in 1889 the mathematician Arthur Cayley wrote "On the Theory of Groups," the paper acting as inspiration for Cornell University and Microsoft researchers presenting a wireless data centre proposal ("On the Feasibility of Completely Wireless Datacentres") at an ACM/IEEE symposium at Austin, Texas. 

The Cayley theorem (from which the so-called Cayley graph is derived) describes the abstract structure of a groups. It forms part of the theoretic proof for not only the feasibility of a wireless data centre, but also how it has high server failure tolerance levels-- the researchers believe the design keeps working until 14% of racks or 59% of server nodes fail.  Read more...