GPU vendor NVIDIA announced at SC08 in Austin, TX this week the Tesla Personal Supercomputer, which marries a conventional desktop PC with add-in Tesla C1060 GPU-based add-in cards. The company has signed up OEM partners - including Dell - worldwide to integrate the Tesla card and provide complete systems to end users. The goal is to provide cluster-level HPC compute power for less than $10,000.

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Convey Computer Corp. used the SC08 supercomputing show in Austin, TX to launch the Convey HC-1, which it claims is the world’s first hybrid-core computer, combining the low cost and simple programming model of a commodity system with the performance of customised hardware architecture.

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Yesterday it was AMD’s turn, as it announced it’s latest Shanghai quad-core 45nm chips. And on Monday, Intel gets to officially launch Nahelem (or Core i7 as it should be referred to on the press releases), the latest in its 45nm line-up. But while Shanghai is pitched mainly at servers, the first Nahelam chips are being pushed first into the desktop market (perhaps to power all those new video games being launched this holiday season).

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Platform Computing and Dell have teamed to release Platform Open Cluster Stack (OCS) – Dell Edition, a HPC software stack optimised to run on Dell hardware. The two companies will jointly market a pre-configured, open source, Dell supported “out-of-the-box” software solution that is designs to be fast and easy to deploy, run and manage.

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Judging by the crowds that flocked to the High Performance on Wall Street event on Monday, Wall Street’s appetite for HPC and low latency is undiminished, despite the meltdown of the markets that are being served. Picking up on that old saying “Why do bank robbers rob banks? Because that is where the money is,” I’ll predict that vendors in both the HPC and low latency space will continue to do business in 2008 and 2009, just as IT spending in other areas takes a big hit.

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At today’s High Performance on Wall Street conference in New York City, Microsoft announced availability of Windows HPC Server 2008, pitching it at Wall Street firms as an easy-to-deploy, cost-effective and scalable high-performance computing (HPC) solution. Morgan Stanley and Lloyds TSB Bank are early adopters.

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Messaging systems vendor Tervela is partnering with grid computing specialist SoftModule to tackle large scale grid deployments with an offering dubbed GridSwitch. Softmodule’s grid computing solution will leverage the hardware accelerated Tervela Message Network in the collaboration, which is focused on financial markets applications.

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Supercomputer specialist Cray has introduced the CX1 personal supercomputer, with an aim on driving high performance computing into mainstream office environments. Priced at between $25,000 and $60,000, the CX1 is based on Intel processors and come pre-installed with Microsoft’s soon-to-be-announced Windows HPC Server 2008.

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Sun Microsystems has extended its family of Intel Xeon-based Sun Fire servers with two new offerings for High Performance Computing (HPC), Cloud/Web 2.0 and back office computing workloads, including a 1U server for HPC workloads and an expandable 2U enterprise-class system. The Sun Fire X2250 and Sun Fire X4250 servers, powered by one or two dual- or quad-core Intel Xeon processors 5200 or 5400 series, run a variety of operating systems, including Solaris 10, Linux and Windows.

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