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

SC09 announces Al Gore will keynote conference

Cray announces Q1 results

Sun announces Q3 results

Intel tops EPA green power rankings, IBM, HP, Sun MIA

IBM BlueGene buys plane ticket, challenges humans on Jeopardy!

Data in motion major obstacle for HPC in the cloud

Computational model of brain wetware achieves first results

Cray, Fernbach, and Kennedy award nominations due July 1

New NSF awards host research in Google, IBM cluster

Green computing winner announced by Climate Savers Computing Initiative

Panasas and Dell hook up with life sciences storage

Cray grows channel for low-end CX1 Windows supercomputer

EnSight CFD announced, supports visualization for fluid dynamics

Ken Kennedy Institute buys Appro

Cisco CEO: clouds “inevitable,” security a “nightmare”

From an article late last week at CSO Online, news that Cisco CEO John Chambers is optimistic about the future of cloud computing (which is good given his company’s recent UCS announcement), and realistic about the infrastructure challenges in making it all work:

Speaking during a keynote address at the annual security confab, Chambers said that cloud computing was inevitable, but that it would shake up the way that networks are secured. “You’ll have no idea what’s in the corporate data center,” he said. “That is exciting to me as a network player. Boy am I going to sell a lot of stuff to tie that together.”

However, he added, “It is a security nightmare and it can’t be handled in traditional ways.”

And he wasn’t the only guy with gloomy visions of spilled data on his mind:

“I think it’s really going to be a focal point of a lot of our work in the cyber security area,” said Ronald Rivest a MIT computer science professor and noted cryptographer, speaking during a conference panel Tuesday. “Cloud computing sounds so sweet and wonderful and safe… we should just be aware of the terminology, if we go around for a week calling it swamp computing I think you might have the right mindset.”

Penguin Computing has record year, plans expansion

eWeek has posted an article on the latest progress made within the camp of Penguin Computing. As of late, the cluster company has made big strides in growing its core business of HPC in the face of a sickened economy. The article specifically includes commentary from Charles Wuischpard, president and CEO of Penguin. Two years after Wuischpard helped refocus Penguin’s business directly towards HPC, they’ve recorded revenue growth of 50-60 percent.

“Really, 2008 was the best year in our [11-year] history,” Wuischpard said in a recent interview.

Revenues are up and expenses are down. So where is Penguin going as a company over the coming months? According to the article, the company plans on making several big announcements over the next few weeks in areas such as on-demand computing and growing their biz via acquisitions. The company is building a large system in Utah focused at tackling memory-intensive HPC workloads.

“People never want to do just on-demand [computing], and they don’t want to spend the money to do it all in-house,” Wuischpard said. “In one proposal [with Penguin], they get both.”

The cogs have certainly been churning within the walls on Penguin these days. You can read the full article here at eWeek.

Obama sets goal for largest R&D investment in US history

From Peter Harsha at the CRA’s Policy Blog:

The President used a speech before the members of the National Academy of Sciences today to reiterate his commitment to boosting the U.S. investment in science and technology. In his remarks before the opening session of the National Academy’s annual meeting, Obama set a goal of seeing the U.S. invest 3 percent or more of its annual GDP in basic and applied scientific research funding. This level of investment would represent the largest investment in American history – an even larger share of GDP than the U.S. invested during the space race of the 1950s and 60s.

More (with links) in Peter’s post. Some key items to note are that Obama pledged to finish the 10 year doubling of funding for NIST, the DOE Office of Science, and the NSF and that he launched ARPAP-E, a DOE clone of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The President also announced the members of his President’s Council of Advisors for Science and Technology (PCAST), including well-known names like Eric Schmidt (Google), Craig Mundie (MS), and David Shaw (D.E. Shaw). The PCAST, and PITAC before it, have traditionally been supporters of high end computing, and we certainly hope that continues with this latest incarnation.

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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].