These supercomputers could be yours

Other eye catchers

If memory is your bag, you want to check out StakTek. The company has an ArctiCore memory module that basically doubles memory density. StakTek packs memory on both sides of its product and can then fold the two sides together via a flexible membrane. It then uses a unique "aluminum core" heatsink to keep the products cool.

All photo credits go to Chris Hipp

You'll find more on the StakTek gear over here.

(Speaking of Arctic items, the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center is hiring. Those of you who share a love for Cray servers and Alaska might want to take a peek here. Tell them El Reg sent you and, if you take the job, invite us up for a visit.)

Another vendor firmly in the Opteron camp that had some cool systems was PogoLinux. It has made use of a popular blade server design with the Katana line. The box can be stacked with 24 Xeon chips or 24 dual-core Opterons. So that's 12 blades in a 4U package. All of the blades are stacked vertically and are easy to remove from the chassis. The design looks similar to the product made by Inventec.

The Verari BladeRack system - pictured below - garnered a bit of attention too. The standard BladeRack system can hold up to 88 AMD- or Intel-based servers in a 7 foot cabinet.

Blades, however, are so yesteryear. Maybe the personal cluster is more your thing. If so, here's the Penguin Computing box we discussed.

And here's the Orion Multisystems kit.

On the software front, ScaleMP gained some attention for its package that turns x86 systems into Unix-like SMP boxes. The company remains in stealth mode, which is laughable given that Rackable Systems is selling an 8-processor box with the software. We'd love to hear some reviews of the code, if any of you have played with it.

Wolfram has also put out a new Personal Grid Edition package that "combines the computational capabilities of Mathematica with high-level parallel language extensions to create an optimal computing framework for quad-core machines." The company claims up to 300 per cent performance improvements over standard Mathematica. It runs on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Unix operating systems in 32-bit and 64-bit flavors.

For some geek funk, head over to Wolfram's make your own ringtone web site.

To help out the biomolecular researcher crowd, the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has become the first institution outside the UK to link up to the Biological Simulation Grid Consortium. The BioSimGrid connects scientists at Oxford, Southampton, Bristol, Birkbeck, Nottingham and York universities. Now the US will be sharing information as well.