More Mainframes and Supercomputers In Depth

Dell simplifies the blade server

Dell's PowerEdge C6220 squeezes four two-socket servers into 2RU, delivering blade server density at a rack-mount price. Insider (registration required)

IT's most wanted: Mainframe programmers

As students study other technologies, vendors try to develop new talent and offer tools to fill the gap for these critical systems

A New Job for Mainframes?

Mainframes are stable, secure and could be perfect for anchoring a private cloud. But where's the user provisioning?

New job for mainframes: Cloud platform

As companies take steps to develop private clouds, mainframes are looking more and more like good places to house consolidated and virtualized servers. Their biggest drawback? User provisioning is weak.

You don't know tech: InfoWorld news quiz

Feb. 18, 2011: iPhones may get smaller, security firm gets unwelcome caller

The clock is ticking on encryption

The strength of today's communications security is based on the complexity of our encryption algorithms. But the day is coming when cracking those algorithms may be computationally trivial.

How China Will Eat the U.S.'s Tech Lunch

Is Congress really ready to make the U.S the world's No. 2 supercomputing power?

Disruptors have lasting impact on IT

Major market shifts in the database world don't happen often. When they do, they're massive, creating an impact that can last 10 to 20 years. When I entered the job market, it was right at the tail end of the last major shift from the mainframe to client/server.

QuickPoll: Should the U.S. be worried about China's supercomputing plans?

The Department of Energy says China is 12 to 18 months away from building an "entirely indigenous" supercomputer. Should the U.S. be worried?

Building inexpensive server clusters

It's possible to get some serious computing power out of graphics processing units and even PlayStations. Here's how four heavy hitters approached the issue.

What we miss about MIS: 5 old-school ideas that weren't so bad

Cobol was king and MIS ruled from on high -- some old-school tech management practices we'd like to see revived.

6 cool innovations for the data center

From a device that combines multiple broadband lines into one, to a way of backing up multiple data centers relatively easily, some of these products and services may well make your life easier.

Big guns for hire: Supercomputing-in-the-cloud

Even small companies can 'act big' by harnessing the power of supercomputing-in-a-cloud that they rent rather than own.

The supercomputer on your desktop

Some medical research and auto-design simulations, once the purview of only the largest computers, are now routinely done on the desktop.

Looking for job security? Try Cobol

As long as there are mainframes, there will be Cobol. Learn the language and the culture and you might land a job that that lasts until retirement

Looking for job security? Try Cobol

As long as there are mainframes, there will be Cobol. Learn the language and the culture and you might land a job that that lasts until retirement

Now Departing: Union Pacific's 40-Year-Old Mainframe

Union Pacific, the railroad company that transports chemicals, coal, food, minerals and automobiles in and around 23 Western U.S. states, has had two workhorses that toiled tirelessly for the past four decades: the diesel locomotive and the IBM mainframe.

Things CIOs Must Know About Mainframe Modernization

1. Mainframe shops have to make decisions: whether to migrate to other platforms, add service-oriented architecture (SOA) interfaces or rewrite applications. With a half-baked strategy, IT winds up "bolting on all sorts of unusual, often architecturally inelegant" work-arounds, argues John B. Rabon, manager of legacy modernization at Aflac. "We saw this happening. You hit this wall of unintended consequences." Aflac is now 60 percent finished with a major conversion initiative.

Swine flu spreads, Apple hires, Twitter hack

Hands down, the swine-flu outbreak captured the headlines this week (and led to some obviously hysterically hyped headlines along the way). Amid the speculation about how much havoc the new virus will wind up wreaking on the world, there also was some more moderated speculation about what Apple is up to in hiring a bunch of chip designers. Oh, and another high-profile Twitter account was hacked ... again.

Need a supercomputer? This guy builds them himself

Bruce Allen is perhaps the world's best do-it-yourselfer. When he needed a supercomputer to crunch the results of gravitational-wave research, he built one with his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.