Some news of note including Tyan's Personal Supercomputer, IBM GPFS, Pathscale's new PCI Express card, Supermicro's new quad opteron board, IBM Cell compiler, and GNU improvements for Itaniuam. Read more for the details and the links.

I knew this day was coming. A commodity desk side cluster system. Yes, Orion Multisystems and Penguin Computing have deskside systems, but these two are from Tyan. Four dual socket blades (Opteron or Pentium D) in a desk side (14" x 12.6" x 26.7") using dual core processors that is 16 Operton or 8 Pentium D cores next to your desk. Current interconnect is on board GigE, but it looks like there is an open slot for your favorite high performance interconnect. Shipping sometime in Q206.

IBM's GPFS recently attained a 102-gigabyte per second transfer rate on the ASC Purple supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The file system was 1.6 petabytes and performance was maintained as 1,000 clients pushed data into the file filesystem.

For those that just ordered the Pentium D deskside Tyan system mentioned above, you will be please to know that Pathscale has released InfiniPath Adapter for PCI Express. More information is in the release.

Somewhat quietly, Supermicro has announced a quad Opteron motherboard. You won't find Opteron motherboards on the main site, you have to go to the secret site to see AMD motherboards.

For those wondering how on earth they will ever write code for their IBM Cell processor (inside their PS3). IBM has released a version of their Octopiler. Looks interesting, but come on guys, the Octopiler logo thingie needs a little work.

And finally, the Itanium Solutions alliance announced the sponsorship of Itanium processor-specific improvements for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). The effort will be coordinated by the Gelato Federation.