“All regions showed growth in both shipments and vendor revenue except for Western Europe which posted a 4.9 percent decline in revenue for the period. Asia/Pacific grew the most significantly in shipments with a 23.9 percent increase. Eastern Europe posted the highest vendor revenue growth at 27.4 percent for the period.”

All of the top five global vendors had revenue increases for the third quarter of 2011, except HP and Oracle. HP declined 3.6 percent year-on-year and Oracle achieved only flat growth. IBM took the lead in the worldwide server market based on revenue, posting just over $3.8 billion in server vendor revenue for a total market share of 29.7 percent for the third quarter of 2011. This share was down 0.5 percent year-on-year. Most of IBM’s revenue growth came from its Power Systems line with some contribution by System X as well.

“x86 servers forged ahead and grew 7.6 percent in units and 9.3 percent in revenue. Some regions like Western Europe and the United States did not produce as much relative x86-based server growth because of comparatively stronger third quarter results in 2010. RISC/Itanium Worldwide Unix server shipments declined 6.8 percent, but vendor revenue increased 3.5 percent compared to the same quarter last year. The ‘other’ CPU category, which is primarily mainframes, showed a decline of 6.9 percent,” Hewitt said.

Despite lower sales numbers, HP remained the worldwide leader in the third quarter of 2011 with 693,265 units shipped in the third quarter. HP managed to maintain a market share of 29.2 percent. Dell followed ahead of IBM with a market share of 21.8 and 12.1 respectivly.

In terms of server form factors, blade servers rose 3.3 percent in shipments and 7.6 percent in revenue for the quarter. The rack-optimized form factor climbed 8.2 percent in shipments and 6.3 percent in revenue for the third quarter of 2011.

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Over the four year period, the estimated investment will be more than $50 million, including a $27.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The project may be renewed for another system deployed in 2017 which would enable four additional years of open science research. When Stampede is deployed in 2013, it will be the most powerful system in the NSF "eXtreme Digital" (XD) environment, currently the most advanced, comprehensive, and robust collection of integrated digital resources and services enabling open science research in the world.

"Stampede will be one of the most powerful systems in the world and will be uniquely comprehensive in its technological capabilities," said TACC Director Jay Boisseau. "Many researchers will leverage Stampede not only as part of their breakthrough scientific research, but for all of their scientific research, including visualization, data analysis and data-intensive computing. We expect the Stampede system to be an exemplar for supporting both simulation-based science and data-driven science."

As a critical part of XD, the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) consortium, comprising more than a dozen universities and two research laboratories, has now replaced the previous, open scientific computing grid, the TeraGrid, as the integrating fabric for the bulk of NSF's high end digital resources. Stampede will enable researchers from any U.S. open science institution to apply for and use its resources for a variety of novel scientific and educational activities.

"We at NSF are gratified to fund such a powerful combination of system and services for open science research," said Irene Qualters, NSF program director for high performance computing. "The technological capacity is important; but even more important is that the scientific community--those on the front lines of cutting edge research on a number of multi-disciplinary areas critical to addressing society's most vexing challenges - have open access in order to push the frontiers of science and engineering."

Computational science has become the third pillar of scientific discovery - complementing theory and physical experimentation - that allows scientists to explore phenomena that are too big, too small, too fast or too dangerous to investigate in the laboratory. Advanced computing enables complex computational science and engineering research and is critical in areas such as weather forecasting, climate modeling, energy exploration and production, drug discovery, materials development and safe and efficient automobile and airplane design.

"This new resource will substantially increase the computational capacity that the XD/XSEDE program can deliver to the open science community for leading edge science," said Barry Schneider, NSF program director for cyber-infrastructure. "It is becoming clear that our progress towards treating more complex and larger problems in the physical and biological sciences will depend crucially on advances in computational science which in turn depend on advances in hardware and software.

Stampede is a balanced, heterogeneous computational instrument which represents an important if not critical path forward in achieving those goals."

The new supercomputer will support more than a thousand projects in computational and data-driven science and engineering from across the United States. It will also allow researchers to develop advanced methods for petascale computing, including Intel MIC architecture optimization, and will foster new expertise in data-intensive computing.

"Stampede will usher forth a new era of computational simulation in which observational and experimental data are assimilated into large-scale models to create better predictions, accompanied by quantified uncertainties," said Omar Ghattas, professor of Geological Sciences and Mechanical Engineering, and director of the Center for Computational Geosciences in the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin. "My group, in particular, is excited about the opportunities Stampede offers to greatly accelerate our work in quantifying uncertainties in computer models of dynamics of polar ice sheets, global seismic wave propagation, and whole-earth plate tectonics," he said.

The computer will be operated and supported by TACC, Dell and a team of cyber-infrastructure experts at The University of Texas at Austin, Clemson University, University of Colorado at Boulder, Cornell University, Indiana University, Ohio State University and The University of Texas at El Paso. It will be used to help train the next generation of researchers in advanced computational science and technology, expanding the use of advanced computing across disciplines and into new communities and domains.

Supercomputer power can be used to shed light on HIV's behavior, opening up new research directions to battle this global disease. Key mutations in specific amino acids in the CA domain change the Gag structure in the immature virion, perhaps altering the HIV-1 maturation pathway. The domains with the highest degree of structure are shown with yellow dots. Image: Gregory A. Voth, University of Chicago

Over the course of several years, Dell shipped almost 12 million OptiPlex desktop computers with leaky capacitors on motherboards. Web hosting company Advanced Internet Technologies (AIT) informed Dell about the issues in 2007 and subsequently filed a lawsuit. According to court documents obtained, "Dell salespeople were told 'don't bring this to customer's attention proactively,' in an effort to conceal system problems", the paper reports. An internal review by Dell found that 97 percent of the PCs in question were likely to fail over a three year period.

Dell started to ship its products to major retailers in the U.S. in 2007, starting with Sam's Club and Wal-Mart. Staples and Best Buy became Dell retail partners later in the year. Dell briefly sold its products through Sears in 2003.

The company has been in hot waters before. After an internal investigation into its accounting practices, Dell announced on August 17, 2007 that it would restate and reduce earnings from 2003 through the first quarter of 2007. The New York Supreme Court ruled in May 2008 that Dell and Dell Financial Services "engaged in fraud, false advertising, deceptive business practices, and abusive debt collection practices."

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Ubuntu is simple and elegant, Dell says. "If you’re the kind of person who likes your computer to simply work, Ubuntu is right for you. It's based on stable, secure, easy-to-use software that’s been around for a long time." Dell claims that Ubuntu is social from the start. "The people who make Ubuntu designed it to be very social-media centric. Do you use Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, or any of the other dozens of popular social networking sites? Ubuntu 9.10 works very well with these websites. And beginning with Ubuntu 10.04, these websites will be integrated into the Ubuntu OS itself for your convenience."

While Ubuntu is available on Dell PC's, Laptops, and Netbooks since 2007, the new push for open source software comes as Dell preparers to ship Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (long term support) on several systems. Dell claims that dramatically improved boot times and thousands of free software programs including OpenOffice ultimately make Ubuntu a better operating system. "Do you need to open Microsoft Office documents? What about Adobe Acrobat? Ubuntu comes with the award-winning OpenOffice software. With it, not only can you create word processing documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and even drawings, but it can also open and save documents in Microsoft Office format. Do you ever get .pdf files emailed to you—no problem!"

A video on YouTube demonstrates the multimedia, 3-D and Windows desktop capabilities of Ubuntu 10.04 here.

Powered by a 1GHz QSD8250 Snapdragon processor, the new smartphone features 1GB of flash with 512MB RAM to ensure fast data processing. Pictures taken with the 5 megapixel camera can be stored on an 8GB MicroSD card. A full QWERTY keyboard is usually hidden under the 4.1 inch OLED display. However, the portrait slider form factor allows easy access if needed.

The handset features FM radio, GPS, compass, and full Flash support that includes video playback. Engadget says that the smartphone will initially support AT&T and T-Mobile 3G networks. The planned market introduction in the fourth quarter of 2010 indicates that the Dell Lightning will be powered by Windows Phone 7 (WP 7), according to the blog. However, it is not clear if WP 7 will support Flash when released. Engadget speculates that the phone could be upgraded to LTE in 2011.