The IBM and Intel Corporation have announced that they are extending their collaboration in the `blade server market’ to drive adoption of an open industry specifications for the blades switches.

A statement here on Saturday (25 Oct) said that this will enable switch vendors to maximise returns on their research and development by developing products to a single design, reaching more customers with just one product.

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There’s an arms race of sorts taking place among some of the world’s largest technology companies as they scamper to control the next wave of office software.

Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Google, I.B.M. and others are selling applications under the unified communications and collaboration banners. Their various packages replace yesteryear’s e-mail and contact software with suites that include Web conferencing, instant messaging, e-mail, online teamwork areas and spots to share all kinds of files.

The language used to describe much of this technology is flimsy. There’s a lot of talk about binary baubles like widgets and mash-ups, which make life easier or disrupt already overwhelmed workers, depending on whom you ask. But the basic idea backing the technology is a simple one. This is E-Mail Plus, where the software you use everyday goes quite a bit farther than it used to.

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IBM announced new software and services for mobile workers Friday, including applications for the iPhone and Blackberry devices. The Armonk, N.Y.-based company cited a surge in mobile devices as an important new market for traditional desktop, storage and server vendors.

BM’s internal research by its Institute for Business Value estimates that more than one billion people will be connected to the Internet this year — a 191 percent jump from 2006. This makes mobile computing one of the fastest-growing markets in the world.

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If Linux is going to make bigger inroads on the desktop, developers need to stop cloning Microsoft Windows and instead produce more unique user interface designs, according to Bob Sutor, IBM’s VP of open source and standards.

Sutor made these remarks today at the Black Hat Conference in Las Vegas, a day after IBM issued the latest in an eight-year series of Linux announcements, joining at LinuxWorld with Linux distributors Red Hat, Novell, and Canonical in an initiative to build “Microsoft-free PCs for business.”
The VP delivered his recommendations around more creative Linux user interfaces as part of a series of predictions about the future of Linux in the next decade. If developers are building applications for the traditional PC desktop, they are better off copying Apple Macintosh concepts about design and usability, Sutor maintained.

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International Business Machines Corp. said it agreed to buy Platform Solutions Inc. in a deal that eliminates litigation and a potential competitor for its lucrative mainframe business. IBM didn’t disclose what it is paying for Platform, a venture-capital backed, Sunnyvale, Calif., company with about 30 employees and ambitious plans to sell powerful computers that run the same software that runs on IBM’s Z-system mainframe computer, which can cost upward of $1 million.

Mainframes are used in the data centers of many of the world’s largest financial institutions and government agencies. The deal comes less than three months after European Union antitrust regulators said they would question IBM about its actions in the mainframe market.

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Size isn’t everything: Power efficiency becomes major factor in new builds. Proving that size isn’t everything, the Top500 List of supercomputers for the first time is looking at power efficiency.

With the IT industry increasingly looking at growing electric bills and calls for greener machines, the world’s most powerful and largest systems are under scrutiny. The latest edition of the twice yearly Top500 List of supercomputers was unveiled today at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany. At the same time, the list authors also provided energy-efficiency calculations for many of the computers on the list.

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IBM said Monday that it was teaming up with semiconductor process company Tokyo Ohka Kogyo (TOK) to develop more efficient and cost-effective solar power technologies, Reuters reported. IBM will bring its expertise in producing power cells to the partnership, while TOK will contribute its technology for coating LCD panels, and technology used in the semiconductor industry.

The IBM/TOK collaboration will focus on improving the efficiency of thin film solar modules. The partnership will seek new techniques for printing copper-indium-gallium-selenide (CIGS) cells. Current solar CIGS makers are producing cells that can turn between six and 12 percent of sunlight into solar power. IBM and TOK aim to create methods that will produce cells with a 15 percent or more efficiency.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists unveiled the world’s fastest supercomputer on Monday, a $100 million machine that for the first time has performed 1,000 trillion calculations per second in a sustained exercise.

The technology breakthrough was accomplished by engineers from the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the IBM Corp. on a computer to be used primarily on nuclear weapons work, including simulating nuclear explosions.

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An anonymous wit scratched those lines on the side of a junked car door and lugged it to a trail near my home in Northern California. The middle of a pristine, ancient redwood grove is the wrong place to find a rusted-out car door, but the words magically transformed the thing from an aggravating piece of junk into art. I Googled the quote as soon as I got home, of course, but found nothing. (Thanks to Google, we live in a world where “I don’t know” has become an unacceptable response. So my inability to identify the author there is driving me crazy.)

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Beating the 3-D stacking heat

Oh, those crazy kids at IBM’s Zürich lab. They can’t get enough of processor cooling technology.

Two years ago, IBM announced a breakthrough with carving channels into chips to let thermal paste sink down nearer the silicon. Then, in 2007, IBM Zürich patted itself on the back for cutting more channels into the cooling unit. Now, IBM looks to pump water between stacks of processors and other common motherboard components to keep them cool.

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IBM® Lotus® Domino® software provides world-class collaboration capabilities that can be deployed as a core e-mail and enterprise scheduling infrastructure, as a business application platform, or both.

Lotus Domino software and its client software options deliver a reliable, security-rich messaging and collaboration environment that helps companies enhance the productivity of people, streamline business processes and improve overall business responsiveness.

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