Here is a collection of highlights, selected totally subjectively, from this week’s HPC news stream as reported at insideHPC.com and HPCwire.

10 words and a link

AMD reports Q1, posts loss

NSF awards support science in the cloud

SiCortex revises green performance index

Computerworld explores rationale behind DoD Mod purchase of SGI

NVIDIA OpenCL driver available for early access

Acumem adds support for Win HPC Server to performance tools

Matlab announces Argonne, Tesla using their tools

Panasas announces new storage line

NASA Ames moves from Sun to SpectraLogic, cuts silos by 80%

News from the Fault Tolerance for Extreme Scalability Workshop

Registration opens for Symposium on Application Accelerators in High-Performance Computing

ICCS offers free HPC tutorials

SC09 announces summer workshops, cluster competition, more

Oracle in agreement to buy Sun

News out this week IBM is out and Oracle is in at Sun (Sun’s press release; Oracle’s press release; Oracle’s Sun acquisition page). From a story at CNNMoney.com early in the week:

Business software maker Oracle Corp. said Monday it has entered into a definitive agreement to buy server builder Sun Microsystems in a deal worth $7.4 billion.

Oracle said it will buy Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash, a 42% premium from Friday’s closing price of $6.69.

Oracle’s Larry Ellison is making happy sounds:

“The acquisition of Sun transforms the IT industry,” said Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison, in a statement. “Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up.”

Oracle…said it sees “strategic customer advantages” to owning two of Sun’s most popular software products: the programming language Java and the Solaris operating system.

And Oracle says it’s looking forward to owning Java and Solaris. I can see Java. But I wonder about the cultures that have to be integrated here, especially in light of Ellison’s strongly negative comments about cloud computing about a year ago:

The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?

Ah me. I do like the cranky IT billionaires. The problem I see is that cloud computing has been such a mainstay of Sun’s public persona for the past 18 months.

HPC? Hard to say. Oracle is a mainstay of the real IT world, and the software part at that. HPC is mostly a hobby for the few enterprise IT hardware makers that have stayed with it. I cannot imagine an enterprise software company indulging it. Vis? Almost certainly not. The boards have approved the deals, and although there will be regulatory scrutiny, the transaction is expected to close in the summer.

Six-core Istanbul moves forward to May

We’re hearing this in several places, but The Register’s Timothy Prickett Morgan has an overview of AMD’s schedule acceleration on the new Opterons:

AMD is picking up the pace for its six-core, Istanbul family of Opteron processors, saying it will ship the chips to paying customers in May with server OEM partners shipping in June.

That brings the Istanbul chips ahead by several months and gives AMD a chance to leapfrog Intel in the two-socket server space, where Intel has just launched its quad-core Nehalem EP Xeon 5500s. It will also provide parity or better with Intel’s six-core Dunnington Xeon 7400s for four-socket servers.

But, this acceleration is not without risk:

And because of the confidence that AMD has after it rejiggered its design and testing processes in the wake of the Barcelona bug, the company took Istanbul from tape out to production on one take, which Pat Patla, general manager of the server and workstation chip business at AMD, said was the first time the company had done that. This could be risky. We’ll know about July or so.

And then there is the 12 core future:

Moving ahead Istanbul means that AMD can also move ahead its high-end Magny-Cours twelve-shooter, which is two Istanbuls put in the same package, side-by-side, with four HT3 links coming out of the chip package.

AMD has more to say about its future in the full press release.

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John West is part of the team that summarizes the headlines in HPC news every day at insideHPC.com. You can contact him at [email protected].