IBM explores 67.1m-core computer for running entire internet

We'll hand it to IBM's researchers. They think big - really big. Like holy-crap-what-have-you-done big.

The Register has unearthed a research paper that shows IBM working on a computing system capable "of hosting the entire internet as an application." This mega system relies on a re-tooled version of IBM's Blue Gene supercomputers so loved by the high performance computing crowd. IBM's researchers have proposed tweaking the Blue Gene systems to run today's most popular web applications such as Linux, Apache, MySQL and Ruby on Rails.

The IBM paper rightly points out that both large SMP (symmetric multi-processing) systems and clusters have their merits for massive computing tasks. Of late, however, most organizations looking to crunch through really big jobs have preferred clusters, which provide certain economic advantages. Customers can buy lots of general purpose hardware and networking components at a low cost and cobble the systems together to equal or surpass the performance of gigantic SMPs.

Sun Microsystems, Amazon.com, Google and Microsoft stand as just some of the companies using these clusters to offer software, processing power and storage to other businesses. Their customers tap into these larger systems and can "grow" their applications as needed by firing up more and more of the provided computing infrastructure. Read More>>

IBM says it will invest more in India this year

Betting big on India's fast growing IT security demand, global IT giant IBM is planning to increase its investments in India out of its $1.5 billion global security budget this year.

IBM has chosen India as one of the three global destinations to deploy its security researchers.

"We are gearing up to cater to the global market opportunity for security spend, which is around USD 100 billion. We are planning to increase investments in our two software laboratories in Pune and Bangalore in 2008," IBM's Worldwide Evangelist for Security Pierre Noel told media.

This investment, which would come as part of IBM's $1.5 billion security initiative, will fund the IT major's ongoing projects to develop new security products in India, Noel said.

In 2006, IBM had said that it would treble its investment to $6 billion by 2009 with a view to enhance its presence in the fast-growing domestic market. More Details>>

IBM dismisses 700 freshers in India

This may literally be a bolt from Big Blue! IBM is learnt to have delivered the pink slip to a sizeable chunk of its entry-level trainee programmers (ELTPs) across major offices in India.

Most of these ELTPs, who were engineering graduates, had put in nearly a year and were working in numerous technology practice groups under IBM India’s global delivery business.

Though IBM is silent on the actual number of ELTPs dismissed, the total is likely to be in excess of 700 across company locations nationally, including 180-odd in Kolkata alone.

ELTPs, who were essentially freshers, were asked to go based on their performance in aptitude tests that were recently conducted in undisclosed IBM India locations. It is learnt that action on the ELTP front in major IBM locations was an ultra hush-hush exercise about which many senior IBM managers were in the dark.

At present, the IBM India management is reluctant to go into the details of its latest HR exercise. But in a written response to ET’s email query, an IBM spokesperson said, “IBM is driven by a high-performance culture, a place where employees are able to contribute at the upper limits of their potential and continually build market-valued skills and capabilities in both formal training and experiential learning. In support of that expectation on the part of our workforce, we are pioneering new ways for our people to certify their skill levels as both a validation of their value to clients and to reinforce the quality of our employees’ personal skill sets.” read full story

Google zooms past IBM

INTERNET advertising giant Google has surpassed IBM to become the world's third most valuable technology company, trailing only behind software giant Microsoft and network leader Cisco.More>>