I challenge the premise that paperless is actually green. Cellulose is rather difficult to biodegrade (if it weren't, all the trees in the world would be eaten to mush). Trees for paper making are generally farmed wood. So keeping your paper statement (even if you throw it out later) acts as a carbon sink. Hence it is good for the environment. Plus, you don't have to deal with the "whoops, that statement you need is too old" issue.
It's far worse than just shaving away at the profit margin. Bragging rights for being the processor (Intel vs AMD vs IBM), the interconnect (Myrinet vs InfiniBand vs Altix), or the assembler (IBM vs HP vs Dell vs etc etc etc) are highly coveted. In general, the top end supercomputers are sold at such heavy discounts that the profit margin may well be a loss margin instead. This is especially true if the machine is bought by an academic institution; universities *never* pay retail for this sort of thing.
I'd be interested to see what the market share split is if you exclude machines which appeared in the top 10 (not just this top 10, but previous top 10s as well). Since neither HP nor Dell seem to have a lot of visibility in the top 10, I'd presume that they're in it for the money, not for the fame. And I'm puzzled as to how Cray and SGI manage to hang on (although, the Altix interconnect is impressive; NUUUUUUUMA!).
So the other day I messaged another admin from the console using the regular old 'write' command (as I've been doing for over 10 years). To my surprise he didn't know how to respond back to me (he had to call me on the phone) and had never even known you could do that. That got me thinking that there's probably lots of things like that, and likely things I've never heard of. What sorts of things do you take for granted as a natural part of Unix that other people are surprised at?
The liquid metal is a key component in Danamics cooling systems. Liquid metal has two major advantages when cooling high power density heat sources: Firstly it has superior thermo physical properties that decrease temperature — and temperature non-uniformity — on die and across chips. Secondly, the electrical properties of the liquid metal enables efficient, reliable and ultra compact electromagnetic pumping without the use of moving parts, shafts, seals, etc.
Awesome technology, if it actually works and is affordable. The submitter requests that the moderators terminate all T-1000 jokes.
Those who can, do; those who can't, write. Those who can't write work for the Bell Labs Record.
