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

SiCortex says Nehalem is too little, too late

AMD comments on Nehalem

(See more Nehalem coverage in the feature below…)

Intel details future graphics silicon

Sun confirms additional 1,500 jobs cut

Cray option buy back update; total cost? $668,699.65.

Intel CEO Otellini says Sun was "shopped around"

The computations behind Monsters vs. Aliens

STFC Daresbury Laboratory installs new Tesla, Nehalem combo cluster

India's Saha Institute Buys a Cray

Oxford installs supercomputer from Streamline Computing

10th Russian Top50 released

Macedonia's first supercomputer

UPCRC Illinois hosts summer school for multicore programming

HPC conferences: smaller can be better

Rackable Systems to Acquire Silicon Graphics

Although it wasn't totally unexpected, this week brought a raft of news about potential shifts in the balance of the HPC force as SGI filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and issued notice that it intends to initiate a Section 363 sale of assets to satisfy its debtors. It is going into the public auction process with one bidder already announced: according to the press release, Rackable has agreed to acquire "substantially all the assets of Silicon Graphics, Inc. for approximately $25 million in cash."

"The combined company will be positioned to solve the most demanding business and technology challenges our customers confront today," said Mark J. Barrenechea, president and CEO of Rackable Systems. "In addition, this combination gives us the potential for significant operational synergies, a strong balance sheet, and positions the combined company for long-term growth and profitability."

"We have been working very hard to strengthen our company, and today, we've taken another big step in that direction," stated Robert "Bo" Ewald, CEO of Silicon Graphics. "This transaction represents a compelling opportunity for Silicon Graphics' customers, partners and employees, who can all benefit from the emerging stronger company with better technologies, products and markets reach."

Barrenechea added, "Together, we believe we will be a much stronger entity with great products and people offering a compelling proposition to compete more effectively in, and across, our collective markets."

Rackable has since suspended its previously announced stock repurchase program. Read the full releases and filings here:

• Silicon Graphics Press Release
• Rackable Systems Press Release
• Silicon Graphics SEC filing
• Rackable SEC filing

In an exclusive conversation, Penguin CEO Charlie Wuischpard comments on the SGI/Rackable deal, and you can also read analysis on the mechanics HPC's deal of the year, that includes insight into SGI's stalking horse strategy.

Everyone: Nehalem. Nehalem, meet everyone.

Intel's Xeon 5500 series processor, the follow-on to Harpertown, the latest Core i7 processor -- that's right, Nehalem-EP -- is out of the closet. From the press release:

The new enterprise-class chips can automatically adjust to specified energy usage levels, and speed data center transactions and customer database queries. They also will play a key role in scientific discoveries by researchers who use supercomputers as their foundation for research, all whilst delivering great energy efficiency for reduced electricity costs.

The are many things to like about this processor for intensive computing, including the dramatically increased bandwidth to memory and Intel's QuickPath Interconnect (the return salvo for AMD's HyperTransport). The (many, many) vendors who also announced new products today are claiming anywhere from 2 to 4 times speedup on applications -- especially those apps that were previously memory bound -- from the 5400s to the 5500s, even though the clocks aren't that different. Of course your mileage may vary.

With over 30 new world records the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series establishes new standards for two-socket performance while delivering gains of more than double the previous-generation Intel Xeon processor 5400 series.

...Cisco delivered an outstanding result on SPEComp*Mbase2001, a high performance computing benchmark which helps evaluate performance of OpenMP applications, that was 154 percent better than previous generation 5400 series.

Intel's 5500 landing page has more detail. An interesting feature of the chips that many seem to be taking advantage of is the advanced power management features. On HP's new G6 lineup of ProLiant servers, for example, you can set a per processor power cap that you won't allow the system to exceed. Why do this in HPC? Well you can put these processors in an existing datacenter that you're "pretty sure" can handle the load without worrying about exceeding the design point for the facility … you just set the cap where you need it to keep from tripping breakers, and run worry free (of course, monitoring power usage to make sure things are behaving as expected).

There are also component improvements:

Intel is also announcing new server boards that offer a higher degree of integrated components. In addition, the company is announcing the Intel 82599 10 Gigabit Ethernet Controller, featuring advanced virtualization technology and unified networking support, which greatly improves network I/O performance in virtualized datacenters. It is optimized to support the increased bandwidth provided by platforms based on the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series, which provides more than 250 percent the I/O throughput of previous-generation servers to best meet the needs of the most demanding virtualization applications.

Some of the vendor products announced today sporting the Nehalem-EP take advantage of the new virtualization and network features to enable users to start efficiently dedicating bandwidth to cores.

Who's on deck with new products? Well, everyone, but let's point to a sampling of HPC vendors and their press announcements

• SGI
• IBM
• HP
• Cray (the CX1)
• Sun
• Penguin Computing
• Verari
• Appro

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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.