Commodity graphics processor chips used in games machines and mobile phones are revolutionising the face of supercomputing – and should lead to the delivery of 4 teraflop desktop machines running Windows HPC or Linux for just north of $10,000 by 2012.

IBM has announced that the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory will use IBM's next-generation Blue Gene supercomputer to enable significant advances in areas such as designing ultra-efficient electric car batteries, understanding global climate change and exploring the evolution of the universe.

IBM has taken an impressive 18 of the top 20 places on the latest Green500 list. The Green500 ranks the world's fastest supercomputers according to their energy efficiency.

The US National Medal of Technology and Innovation has been presented to IBM and to PostScript inventors John Warnock and Charles Geschke. The medals were presented by President Barack Obama at a White House ceremony.

IBM has shamed its competitors, ranking by far the most environmentally friendly supercomputer maker. Eighteen of the top 20 systems on the Green500 list were made by IBM. The Green500 ranks supercomputers according to the number of floating-point operations per second they can perform for each watt of power consumed.

Australian weather forecasters are set to get a supercomputer 12 times as powerful as their existing system. More than 2500 Nehalem-based Sun Blades will be installed in Canberra and Melbourne.

The 32nd list of the top 500 supercomputers in the world, based on performance, has been published and Intel is inside an astonishing 379 of them! So, just how fast is the top ten?

Windows HPC Server 2008 is the latest member of Microsoft's operating systems family to go into production. HPC - high performance computing - is aimed at customers with major number-crunching tasks.

IBM has smashed its competitors in the latest Green500 list of the most energy-efficient supercomputers, which shows that performance and running costs need not be diametrically opposed. The latest list shows that other supercomputer vendors are struggling to compete with IBM in the bang per Watt stakes.

IBM has obliterated the competition in the supercomputing stakes with the top 10 of the top 500 supercomputers in the world, but Microsoft has surprisingly scraped in at number 23 with its Windows HPC Server system. While Microsoft is an unlucky 13 numbers away from the top 10, does the wow start now?