
Botnets
It'd be interesting if any of the larger botnets out there ran the Linpack benchmark on their er... botnet and posted the results for comparison purposes.
For the first time since the Top 500 rankings of the most powerful supercomputers in the world was started 23 years ago, the United States is not home to the largest number of machines on the list – and China, after decades of intense investment and engineering, is. Supercomputing is not just an academic or government …
Last (only really) Bull machine I ever used (stretching that word a bit, I was testing a driver) was a 6U Itanium system running Suse Linux. Perhaps its descendants still exist.
Of course, those of us of a certain age may recall the Gamma 60. That was quite an architectural leap.
BTW: in a "how they have fallen" moment, the spelling checker in this comment form does not recognize "Itanium"
And probably good news for ARM. Even if the Chinese are using their own chips, I doubt that they would have invented a completely new architecture for this. The Chinese have a ton of experience with ARM thanks to producing the iPhone and its knockoffs, and so it was only a matter of time before they would start building their own server chips instead of importing from America or Taiwan.