For the first time in 62 years, the four-man Olympics bobsled team from the US captured the gold medal, setting a course world record in the process. The winning bobsled had some state-of-the-art engineering behind it, including CFD software from Exa Corporation. As it turned out, that software may have proved to be the margin of difference in the race.

Cray and Microsoft Research partner on cloud computing project; IBM donates a POWER7-based supercomputer to Rice University; and the Kavli Foundation hosts a dialogue on the convergence of nanoscience and neuroscience. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.

Multicore software specialist Fixstars Corporation has released Yellow Dog Enterprise Linux (YDEL) for CUDA, the first commercial Linux distribution for GPU computing. The OS is aimed at HPC customers using NVIDIA GPU hardware to accelerate their vanilla Linux clusters, and is designed to lower the overall cost of system deployment, the idea being to bring these still-exotic systems into the mainstream.

A safer nuclear reactor could be on the horizon thanks to computer modeling; and the National Science Foundation awards $24.5 million to UC Berkeley researchers engaged in reducing the power draw of electronics. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.

In what IBM is characterizing as a "breakthrough," researchers have developed an algorithm that cuts the computational costs of assessing data quality by two orders of magnitude. The new algorithm has potentially far-reaching applicability, extending to nearly all types of analytics applications as well as scientific modeling and simulation.

Cluster computing systems have caused disruptive changes in the HPC market. One consequence of the range of requirements for cluster networking is that the leading interconnects in HPC are Gigabit Ethernet (GbE), which is based on Ethernet networking standard, and InfiniBand, delivering upwards of 10X performance vs. GbE. Both show significant deployment in HPC.

As high performance computing vendors polish their server and workstation portfolio with the latest multicore CPU and GPGPU wonders, Pico Computing is quietly making inroads into the HPC application space with its FPGA-based platforms. By picking its spots where reconfigurable computing makes the most sense, the company is looking to leverage its scalable FPGA technology to greatest effect.

Supercomputer maker Cray had one of its best years in recent memory, but just missed posting a profit. This week the company told investors what went wrong and right for the company in 2009, and gave an outline of what's on tap for 2010.

Mellanox introduces flexible remote boot technology; Carnegie Mellon University adds newest cluster to cloud computing test bed Open Cirrus, and Barbie doll turns techie. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.

SGI today announced "Cyclone," a cloud service aimed specifically at technical computing. Although the company has sold hardware that ended up in other peoples' clouds, Cyclone represents SGI's first foray into the cloud as a service provider. The idea is to provide a purpose-built HPC cloud, wrapped with third-party application software, and backed up by SGI's considerable HPC expertise.

Chipmakers converged on San Francisco this week to talk up their newest semiconductor products at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). Of particular interest to the HPC crowd are Intel's Westmere EP and "Tukwila" Itanium 9300, and IBM's POWER7.

It seems only natural that the US space agency would be casting its eyes toward the clouds. Sure enough, NASA is now looking to cloud computing to optimize the operation of the agency's IT infrastructure for some of its science codes. Like many commercial businesses and government organizations, NASA is being asked to do more computing with fewer datacenter resources.

The Victorian State Government of Australia and IBM establish a life sciences research collaboratory at the University of Melbourne; and Cray's mid-range systems attract new business. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.

TACC's Ranger supercomputer celebrates its second year of enabling important research; Microsoft partners with NSF to bring cloud services to researchers; and NSF submits its fiscal year 2011 budget request. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.

The DOE announces annual INCITE supercomputing awards; NVIDIA and the University of Illinois partner on a textbook for programming massively parallel processers. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.

There is no such thing as an NSF (Supercomputer) Center and there never has been. There should be. What there are, in the words of Ed Hayes, then comptroller of NSF, are "NSF ASSISTED Supercomputer Centers." This is a double edged sword.

Researchers virtualize Sandia's Red Storm supercomputer; and Princeton University announces plans for new research center. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.

Voltaire has announced the Grid Director 4036E, a new QDR InfiniBand switch that includes a built-in Ethernet gateway. As such, it acts as a network bridge that hooks together QDR InfiniBand and 10 GigE infrastructure, all implemented inside a 1U box.

All that noise and vibration you experience in the datacenter is not just annoying; it's also killing the performance of your hard disk drives. So says Green Platform CEO Gus Malek-Madani, who thinks he has developed an innovative rack design that will reclaim storage I/O performance and, in the process, save datacenters billions of dollars.

Special Feature: The new year is a time for reflection, especially after the turbulent economic environment that marked 2009. In that spirit, HPCwire invited the HPC vendor community to post a new year's message to our readers. First in the series, is Bruce Toal, CEO, President and Co-Founder for Convey Computer.