The Blue Gene/L is currently benchmarked at 135.3 trillion floating points per second. When completed, the computer is expected to have 64,000 IBM Power PC processors, and is expected to reach 360 teraflops.
Next-gen XBox may not be backwardly compatible
Rumours have it that the next-gen XBox, possibly going to be called XBox360, will not be backwardly compatible with the current XBox. This may indicate Microsoft is taking a departure from the current ‘cheap PC in a box’ game platform, maybe heading towards something more radical. If they’re keeping tabs on Sony’s upcoming PS3 then they had better pull something pretty stellar out from up their sleeve, since the hype surrounding Sony’s Playstation 3 is leading us to believe their new box is going to be a supercomputer for the masses…
Fans wait overnight in the rain for PSP release
People wanting to be among the first to pick up a Sony PSP on its release day today (March 24th, 2005), camped out overnight in San Francisco at the Metreon Center to be first in line at 12:01am when the store opened it’s doors.
News.com has an article and pictures of the crowd waiting in the rain last night.
Sun research team working on mulitasking VM
A user can today run multiple processes each one in it’s own running VM instance, but this substantially duplicates loading of reseources, libraries, and does not effectively use resources on the host machine.
The prototype from the Sun lab allows multiple Java apps to be executed concurrently within the same VM, each process sharing resources with each other, where possible, and controlled by the VM itself.