Despite the Cloud, Supercomputer Demand Strong
Seattle — For PGS, an oil-imaging company in Oslo, Norway, finding pockets of oil and natural gas in the ground essentially starts by taking a large ultrasound picture of Earth. “It involves huge amounts of data,” said Guillaume Cambois, PGS’ executive vice president of imaging and engineering. “And, of course, time is of the essence.” PGS, short for Petroleum Geo-Services, this year tried to speed up that work by buying a...
Hewlett-Packard Set To Split Into 2 Firms
San Francisco — One of the nation’s most storied tech companies will split in two this weekend, another casualty of seismic shifts in the way people use technology — and big-company sluggishness in responding. Hewlett-Packard was an early pioneer of what became the model for Silicon Valley startups: Founded in 1939 by two Stanford graduates in a Palo Alto, Calif., garage, HP was long celebrated for its engineering know-how and...
Initiative Proposed To Build World’s Fastest Computer
Washington — President Obama has launched an ambitious technology initiative, a moonshot in the world of supercomputing that could help solve some of the world’s most complex problems. The project, known as the National Strategic Computing Initiative, aims to speed up the development of an “exascale computing system” — a supercomputer that can process a billion billion operations per second. (That’s not a typo; there are two...
Cloud-Computing at Amazon Shows Growth
New York — Amazon’s profitable cloud-computing services business is growing by leaps and bounds. That growth helped the e-commerce company Thursday post a 15 percent first-quarter revenue jump and a smaller-than-expected loss. The results sent Amazon’s shares up 6 percent in aftermarket trading. Investors have been growing restless with Amazon’s long-term strategy of plowing most of the money it makes into new areas like cloud...
