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Happy Holidays everyone!
Like much of the world, we here at Pingdom will be taking a short Christmas break. Since we won’t be updating the blog until sometime next week, here is a selection of posts from the past year that you might have missed.
Computer hardware has become infinitely more powerful through the years, a trend that has allowed computer makers to push the performance to levels we almost thought were impossible just a decade earlier.
The exponential growth of computing performance is very noticeable when you examine how the performance of the world’s most powerful computer systems, the supercomputers, has changed over time.
China just officially climbed to the top position in the supercomputer performance race. You may have read that the country now has the fastest, and also the third fastest, supercomputer in the world.
But this was no overnight success. It’s been a long race for China to get there. Back in the 90s, China’s presence in the supercomputer top 500 was almost non-existent, so most of this progress has happened in the last decade.
Xserve, Apple’s rather elegant server hardware (seen here above), was introduced back in 2002. Less than a week ago, Apple announced that it will be discontinued after January 31, 2011. Apparently, Xserve wasn’t selling enough.
Apple isn’t killing its server OS, though. It will continue to deliver Mac OS X Server, but on Mac Pro and Mac Mini instead.
This means that Apple is backing out of the server hardware business, completely. Mac Pro, although powerful, is a workstation computer, with everything that means in terms of form factor and other hardware design decisions. Mac Mini, although small, can’t be considered a decent Xserve replacement either. Simply put, none of the two are servers.
We often think of computers as a very modern phenomenon, but there were actually plenty of computers around 50 years ago. They just weren’t an everyman commodity, instead limited to goverment and corporate use. And they certainly weren’t small. Some of them had imaginative names like Whirlwind, Colossus and Pegasus, while others were slightly less poetic with names like Z4, AN/FSQ-7 and ENIAC.
Below we have listed as many as 19 examples of computers from the early days, pioneering efforts that although cutting edge in their day now look lovingly retro.
Twice a year, the world’s top 500 supercomputers are announced. The most recent winner is the Jaguar which pretty much wiped the floor with the competition, managing a performance benchmark 69% above the IBM Roadrunner which came in second.
Let’s take a closer look at the Jaguar, the fastest supercomputer in the world today.
Since the dawn of technology people have been arguing about which technology is better. As with all such debates there are usually no simple answers and it often comes down to personal taste.
These discussions tend to be very infected due to the almost religious belief shown by the most hardcore supporters of a technology, a thorough conviction that all other options are inferior. Sometimes the technology creators themselves also add fuel to the fire by joining the discussions.
Are you a programmer? Want to do something for the environment and even make the world a better place? Then start optimizing your code!
It seems like today the solution to most software performance issues is to throw more hardware at the problem instead of making the software run faster on existing hardware. Doing more with less is a forgotten mantra, and Wirth’s Law continues to ring true:
Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.
This has to be one of the more bizarre gadgets we’ve seen lately. It’s a Japanese device called the Akiduki Pulse box that automatically posts your heart rate to Twitter.
For decades, supercomputers have helped scientists perform calculations that would not have been possible on regular computers of that time. Not only has the construction of supercomputers helped push the envolope of what is possible within the computing field, but the calculations supercomputers have performed for us have helped further both science and technology, and ultimately our lives.
This post pays tribute to some of the most powerful supercomputers the world has seen, all the way from the 1970s until today.
