Appro deploys Linux cluster testbed at Lawrence Livermore; SeaMicro introduces redesigned x86 architecture with launch of Internet-optimized server. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.

The good folks at the Uptime Institute estimate that datacenter CO2 emissions will quadruple between 2010 and 2020; also that annual global datacenter CO2 emissions are already on par with the CO2 emissions of the airline industry, or even entire countries. Maybe we should put datacenters in airplanes and keep all the CO2 flying around.

AMD has not been at the forefront of the emerging GPU computing paradigm, but the company's upcoming Fusion processors and its commitment to OpenCL could provide a compelling strategy for bringing graphics acceleration to high performance computing.

PRACE petascale research infrastructure launches with 19 member countries; Intel, imec and five Flemish universities open Flanders ExaScience Lab. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.

At last week's International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Hamburg, HPCwire sat down with Cray CTO Steve Scott to talk about life after Baker, where he revealed the company's plans for its upcoming "Cascade" supercomputer and how the exascale landscape is shaping up.

Last week, the InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA) used the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC'10) to unveil the new roadmap for InfiniBand. In a nutshell, the IBTA is moving the technology to 104 Gbps, using a new coding scheme that promises 100 Gbps of useful data in a 4-lane configuration.

Tokyo Tech to build 2.4 petaflop supercomputer with a hybrid computing architecture; and scientists from the J. Craig Venter Institute create the first synthetic bacterial cell. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.

SMP virtualization specialist ScaleMP has announced vSMP Foundation 3.0, the third generation of its virtual SMP solution for high performance computing clusters. The new release adds some much-needed updates, including increased scalability and additional hardware support.

Supercomputer maker Cray did a pre-launch of sorts for its upcoming "Baker" supercomputer on Tuesday, giving the machine its official product designation: the XE6. Although the company won't be shipping the hardware until later this year, there's already a backlog of orders for the petascale machines, and Cray is setting the stage for a big debut.

NOAA, ORNL to pursue advanced climate modeling with next-generation Cray supercomputer; and Swiss researchers develop a 3D model that can detect early stages of heart disease. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.

Microsoft's ambitions have always been big. A quarter of a century ago, the company's primary mission was to put a consumer-friendly computer on every desktop. At least in the industrialized world, they can consider that mission accomplished. Now they want to do nothing less than model the world.

NVIDIA's GPU computing ambitions got a major boost today with IBM's announcement of the iDataPlex dx360 M3. The new HPC server pairs two Tesla GPUs with two CPUs inside the same server chassis.

In general, connectivity solutions can be divided into multiple categories: standard (such as InfiniBand and Ethernet) versus proprietary (such as SeaStar and Quadrics), high speed versus low speed, and offloading (or network-based processing) versus onloading (i.e., host-based processing).