Microsoft breaks petaflop barrier

The organisation behind the World's Top 500 Supercomputers list has revealed that China grabbed the supercomputing leadership spot with the Tianhe-1A system located at the National Supercomputer Centre in Tianjin, notes Tom's Hardware.

The system has achieved a performance level of 2.57 petaflops per second - literally quadrillions of calculations per second.

However Network World points out that a Windows HPC Server-based supercomputer has actually broken the petaflop speed barrier, the Tsubame 2.0 computer-based at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

The BlackBerryenterprise server will now be monitored by the Indian government in a live manner, states Ganpati Times.

Canada-based Research In Motion (RIM) will now legally allow access to high-profile corporate users' e-mails and messages sent via Blackberry's messaging system.

With over 400 000 BlackBerry owners, India is regarded as an 'important market' by RIM who has finally relented to the pressure of the government. The deadline set by the government still stands till 30 January next year but the upcoming visit of the Canada's director of intelligence on 19 November can be seen as a catalyst to the process.

AMD's next-generation server chip is based on 'Bulldozer' architecture, which will target everything from mainstream clients (desktops) to servers and will be available sometime next year, reveals the Bangkok Post.

Bulldozer takes a fresh look at what can be shared and what should be kept independent in a multi-core chip.

There are two approaches for symmetrical multi-threading. Intel's Hyper Threading has everything shared between the two (virtual) cores, even the core itself. The other extreme is where every core has all the resources of a single core. This ends up wasting die space and power. AMD's approaches this differently with what it calls 'two strong threads'.