More Mainframes and Supercomputers In Depth

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

Silver Surfers are past it? Never!

Been around a while? You may well be a "Silver surfer" and that makes you an IT hero!

You don't know tech: InfoWorld news quiz

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

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.

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

The 11 most influential microprocessors of all time

From the brains of the Voyager space mission to the inspiration for modern CPUs, here are the chips that built our modern technological culture.

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.

College dropout is one-man IT shop — at college lab

Meet Justin King -- the one-man IT shop. At the five-year-old Human Neuroimaging Laboratory at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, IT plays a key role in innovative research involving functional magnetic resonance imaging machines.

Five movies starring computers

Five movies that feature computers and programs as part of the cast.

Q&A: What Roadrunner's petaflop Top500 milestone is all about

The Top500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers passed a milestone Wednesday with the first system to achieve peak performance of 1 petaflop, or one quadrillion floating point operations per second. Erich Strohmaier, a computer scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, was one of the founding editors of the Top500 list back in 1993. He talked with IDG News Service about the performance gains the list has seen, the quad-core processors that are coming to dominate it and mistakes that can creep in when the list is put together.

Image Gallery: A look inside what may be the world's fastest supercomputer

IBM shows off its nearly-completed new Roadrunner supercomputer, which is expected to break the petaflop barrier.

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Tales from the crypt: Our first computers

Computerworld editors share stories of their first PCs, including some classics and some real clunkers. Then we turn the tables and ask readers to share their early-PC tales.

Opinion: IGF — IBM's unseen competitive weapon

IBM Global Financing is a competitive threat because Big Blue uses it as a sales tool during the selling process, not just as an after-the-sale financing option.

Confessions of a Cobol programmer

Yes, Cobol is dying -- just not yet. In that gap, some wily coders see opportunity for a career, or at least a secure job.

Gaming Technology: Beyond Entertainment

The massive, low-cost computing power that has transformed video gaming will bring benefits to many important industries.