Here's 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

insideHPC exclusive look at the SC08 Cluster Challenge competitors

HPC earnings season: Cray drinks champagne, SGI hires new CFO

Wolfram hosts Mathematica on the Nimbis cloud

Linux Mag test drives the iDataPlex, finds engineering excellence

Rogue Wave's parallel computing survey

EGI.org is looking for a home

IBM storms British Isles with systems in Wales and Ireland

Meet, greet, and dine with Andy Bechtolsheim at SC08

LECCIBG/Beowulf Bash 2008 at SC08

TotalView supports Sony Cell platform

AMAX launches Tesla-based personal supercomputer

InsideTrack: Sun may be winning some business in a shakeup down under

A source close to insideHPC has given us a glimpse into some of what is going on in HPC in Australia with the Australian Bureau of Meteorology HPC acquisition. The acquisition covers several existing installations, with incumbents NEC and SGI. The acquisition calls for a machine each at APAC and CSIRO, with a hot spare at the BOM. APAC researchers seem to prefer a cluster and NOT a vector-based system as their primary machine, whereas BOM/CSIRO are happy with a vector system.

Word from the InsideTrack initially was that IBM has a good shot since they often follow the UK Met organization, which recently went IBM. However the picture was unclear, as APAC evidently aren't keen on IBM. It now appears that IBM has been ruled out, as has Cray. HP didn't bid.

Which leaves NEC, SGI, and.... In fact the InsideTrack has been told that the announcement of the winner is delayed due to extended negotiations with Sun. We'll definitely keep our eye on this one.

Apple Blade-Server?

Chalk another one up for speculation. Those of you intimately involved with the Apple and/or IBM server community have probably seen the dust IBM is kicking up over Mark Papermaster. Uh, who? Papermaster, until recently, was the head of IBM's blade server division. After 20 years of black coats and red ties, he opted for t-shirts and Birkenstocks by taking a gig at Apple. Apparently, Mr. Papermaster had forgotten the "no-compete" agreement he signed with IBM, thus preventing him from working for a competitor for at least one year. IBM is sueing Papermaster for committing such a no-no.

I think the real story here is, why does Apple want a blade server-guru? The XServe was a decent server platform. Now that Apple has made the move to Intel processors, they need something other than OSX to push further into the heavily competitive server market. Does this mean we're going to see an Apple blade platform? This might be terribly interesting as a cluster platform.

For more details on this speculation and the Papermaster stink, read the full article here.

20 years is a long time in HPC years

This is the 20th anniversary of the annual SC conference, and organizers are doing up the dog this year. Part of the celebration will be a recognition of companies and individuals who have been involved with all 20 conferences. It's enough of an achievement for an individual to have been at each of the conferences, but thinking about how dramatically the hardware and software landscape has changed in that time, it's really quite remarkable for a company to have been at all 20 conferences.

In fact, the insideHPC news gnomes have been scrabbling around in gardens all over the world, and have turned up a list of what we think are the 9 organizations, 6 of them companies, that will be recognized at this year's conference:

The Numerical Algorithms Group
Cray
IBM
Sun
NEC
HPCwire
LANL
LLNL
NASA

Kudos to these companies, and the testament to their adaptability and commitment over time.

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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 john@insidehpc.com.