Micron to buy Elpida, DRAM market left with 3 competitors

Bloomberg brings news from Japan that U.S-based chipmakerMicron Technology will purchase Japanese rival Elpida. This falls in line with a statement made last month by CEO Mark Durcan that Micron would make the purchase, but only if it could avoid stock dilution and the acquisition of too much interest-bearing debt.

Micron is the last major U.S-based maker of memory chips, well known for its brand of Crucial memory and its solid entries into the SSD space. Elpida is a major supplier or memory chips for Apple.

Elpida filed for bankruptcy in February due a perfect storm of falling DRAM prices and Japan's increasingly strong currency, a combination which makes it difficult to export goods which are both profitable and competitively priced.

Micron is said to be paying about 140 billion yen -- or about 1.76 billion dollars -- just to shed a portion of Elpida's debt. The report also claims that Micron will also be investing about 100 billion yen in Elpida's facilities, a shot in the arm which should bolster its ability to crank out DRAM chips.

Micron's absorption of Elpida will leave the global DRAM market with only three competitors: Samsung, Hynix and Micron. Currently, Samsung owns about 41 percent of the market while Hynix comes in a distant second at 24 percent. Both Micron and Elpida weigh in around 12 percent each, meaning their combined total will essentially tie them with Hynix in terms of market volume.

IBM supercomputer overtakes Japan's Fujitsu as world's fastest

IBM's latest supercomputer, Sequoia, has taken the crown as the world’s fastest supercomputer in the TOP500 List after achieving 16.32 petaflops. That was enough to beat Japan's Fujitsu built supercomputer and marks the first time in over two years the US has topped the fastest supercomputer rankings.

Sequoia will be put to use by the US Department of Energy at their Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) for carrying out simulated nuclear weapons testing, helping figure out how to extend the life of aging nuclear weapons and also to avoid live underground tests.

"While Sequoia may be the fastest, the underlying computing capabilities it provides give us increased confidence in the nation's nuclear deterrent," said National Nuclear Security Administration administrator Thomas D'Agostino. "It also represents continued American leadership in high performance computing."

Sequoia provides an astounding 16.32 petaflops of computing performance, around 16 thousand trillion calculations per second and comprises of 96 racks containing 98,304 compute nodes, 1.6 million processor cores and 1.6 petabytes of RAM covering over 4,500 square feet of floorspace.

"For a machine with 1.6 million cores to run for over 23 hours six weeks after the last rack arrived on our floor is nothing short of amazing," LLNL division leader Kim Cupps told Ars Technica. It achieved this score by running the Linpack benchmark for 23 hours solid without a single core failing, although the unit is actually capable of exceeding 20 petaflops.

In comparison, Japan's Fujitsu built K Computer housed in the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science has 705,000 processing cores giving 10 petaflop. Japan's supercomputer previously took the crown from a Chinese built supercomputer. The last time the US held the top spot was back in November 2009.

Despite its enormous size, IBM boasts the supercomputer is actually very efficient. It consumes 7,890 kilowatts of power at full load, whereas Japan's now second-placed K Computer consumes considerably more at 12,659 kilowatts. Its reduced power consumption is due in part to its primary cooling system, which uses water running through tiny copper pipes encircling each node card.

The entire supercomputer runs on Linux, with Compute Node Linux running on nearly 98,000 nodes, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on 768 I/O nodes that are connected to the filesystem.

Google archives Japan tsunami damage through Street View

Google has made good on an initiative announced earlier this year to archive areas of Northeastern Japan that were affected by the earthquake and resulting tsunami in March. 360-degree imagery of devastated areas is now available through Street View in Google Maps.

Vehicles equipped with Street View cameras traveled more than 44,000 kilometers to survey the affected regions. Viewers can see a before and after comparison to get an idea of how severe the damage was. Google has also implemented a timestamp feature in the bottom left corner of each image that shows the month and year the photo was taken. This has been one of the most requested features in Street View and it is now available on Street View imagery worldwide. Timestamps will help historians, architects, city planners, travelers and potential home buyers get a sense of how fresh images are for areas that interest them.

The search giant has also made the imagery available through a special website called Building the Memory where visitors can compare before and after shots of towns forever changed by the disaster.

Google hopes that the images from Japan will ultimately help researchers and scientists to better understand the effects of natural disasters. The images will also help to ensure that the memories of the disaster will remain relevant and tangible for future generations. The team was taking donations for relief efforts through the Google Lat Long Blog earlier this year but Japan likely didn't do itself any favors last week by announcing that $29 million of post-tsunami recovery funds were being allotted to the whaling industry.