The National Science Foundation has awarded funding to four projects as part of the Future Internet Architecture program; and the 3PAR bidding war is won by HP. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.

Intel Corp has released Parallel Studio 2011, a set of four tools designed to mainstream software development on multicore x86 architectures. The update folds in a number of parallel programming technologies that the company has acquired or developed independently over the past few years, including the Cilk Arts and RapidMind technologies, and Intel's own Ct data parallel language framework.

There's nothing like a blazing hot summer to focus one's attention on the best ways to keep cool. That goes for datacenter operators as well, who are equally worried about keeping their servers properly chilled. While there is no shortage of innovative cooling solutions being proffered by various vendors, a new liquid immersion cooling solution from startup Green Revolution Cooling could end up being the best of them all.

Researchers from TACC and MIT created lightweight supercomputing application for smart phone; and the tug of war over 3PAR continues, as Dell and HP both present counter-offers. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.

Advanced Micro Devices is hoping Bulldozer, the company's first x86 microarchitecture redesign in seven years, will bring back the glory days for the Opteron. AMD revealed additional details about the new architecture this week during the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University.

High frequency trading (HFT), often called algorithmic or low latency trading, relies on fast computers and even faster networks to execute trades in sub-second and even sub-millisecond timeframes. It has generated massive profits for those firms skilled enough to handle the complexities of the software and hardware. As such, it has become the dominant method for equity trading in the US, but it's popularity is expanding worldwide, especially Asia. HPCwire got the opportunity to ask Chuck Chon, chief technology officer of SBI Japannext, about the HFT business in Japan.

Purdue group invents energy management device that prevents need for costly datacenter shutdowns; and Dell announces its intention to purchase 3PAR for 1.15 billion. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.

Fifty-one Campus Champions attended TeraGrid's fifth annual conference in Pittsburgh, Pa., recently. Accounting for about 15 percent of attendees, the champions bring a wealth of experience to the program, including knowledge of TeraGrid systems and services, their local campus resources, and other cyberinfrastructures such as the Open Science Grid. This is our fifth and final in a series covering the TeraGrid conference.

MIT spin-out Lyric Semiconductor Inc. has launched a new breed of integrated circuits that replaces the binary logic of traditional computing with probabilistic logic. The aim is to deliver a much more efficient architecture for applications based on probability computing. For these types of workloads, the company is promising orders-of-magnitude improvement in energy efficiency, performance and cost.

At this year's TeraGrid conference, Bob Wilhelmson, recently retired chief science officer of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and former applications lead for the Blue Waters project, delivered a keynote address in which he discussed the Blue Waters architecture and shared several planned projects for the new supercomputer. This is our fourth in a series covering the TeraGrid conference.

The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has selected four "performers" to develop prototype systems for its Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC) program. According to a press release issued on August 6, the organizations include Intel, NVIDIA, MIT, and Sandia National Lab. Georgia Tech was also tapped to head up an evaluation team for the systems under development.

COSMOS Consortium selects an SGI Altix UV supercomputer to support high-end workloads; and Verari rebrand announced. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.

Dr. Tim Killeen, representing the National Science Foundation, last week addressed the annual TeraGrid '10 conference in Pittsburgh, Pa. His keynote emphasized the urgent need for sustainable cyberinfrastructure in the geosciences and across all domains of science. This is our third in a series covering the TeraGrid conference.

It wasn't hard to spot the students who took part in the TeraGrid '10 conference in Pittsburgh, Pa., last week. All you had to do was look for the yellow shirts. More than 100 students took part in the event -- graduate students, undergrads, and high schoolers. This is our second in a series of articles covering the TeraGrid conference.

TeraGrid '10, the fourth annual conference of the TeraGrid, took place last week in Pittsburgh, Pa. HPCwire will be running a series of articles highlighting the conference. The first in the series covers Gabrielle Allen's keynote talk on Cactus, an open, collaborative software framework for numerical relativity.

The bar for what qualifies as a fast connection or "low latency" networking has always been higher in finance than in other areas of corporate networking. It's never been quite this high, however.

In May, Intel announced the Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture, with a development kit codenamed Knights Ferry. NVIDIA has announced and started to deliver its next-generation architecture, Fermi. PGI's Michael Wolfe presents an in-depth comparison of the two designs.

Cray's first XT6 customer revealed and Q2 earnings statement released; Grid-X comes out of hiding after several years of secrecy. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.

R language booster Revolution Analytics is going after the predictive analytics crowd with its latest Revolution R Enterprise software platform. The company announced this week it will be introducing a package called RevoScaleR to bring the R language into the world of "Big Data," enabling analytics applications to turbo-charge their performance and scale terabyte-sized mountains of data.

The increasing number of CPU cores raises issues regarding the relatively low utilization of the recent manycore CPUs, along with the potential increase in wasted energy, and the low degree of parallelization of many applications submitted to manycore-based servers. In light of these concerns, Wolfgang Gentzsch poses a series of questions to eXludus CEO Dale Geldart about the development of the multicore optimizer MCOPt.