Sebastian Renzi’s Blog

I was really surprised when I saw HTC using Twitter for important product announcements like:

“sad news, US. we looked into it- by the time we could bring Touch HD to the states, it would be old news. we do have other cool stuff coming”

After researching a little bit I realized that HTC is not the only big company using Twitter as an official communication channel.

Comcast (USA) is giving technical support, CNN interacts with listeners through Twitter and many others like airlines, retailers and media companies.

Here you will find a list of companies using twitter in different areas, like customer support, marketing, flight status and technical support among others.

Media
Reuters http://twitter.com/reuters
CNN http://twitter.com/cnnbrk
BBC (Off-site List) http://menti.net/?p=17
NY Times http://twitter.com/nytimes 
ZDNet http://twitter.com/zdnett
CNET News http://twitter.com/CNETNews
Times OnLine http://twitter.com/TimesWorldNews
CBC News http://twitter.com/cbcnews

Airlines/Travel
Carnival Cruise Lines http://twitter.com/CarnivalCruise
Delta http://twitter.com/deltaairlines
Jetblue http://twitter.com/JetBlue
Southwest Airlines http://twitter.com/SouthwestAir
Mahalo Travel http://twitter.com/mahalotravel

Retailers
Dell Outler http://twitter.com/DellOutlet
Direct2Dell http://twitter.com/Direct2Dell
Direct2Dell (China): http://twitter.com/Direct2Dell_CN
Studio Dell http://twitter.com/StudioDell
WOOT: http://twitter.com/woot
Apple: http://twitter.com/appleinc 
Amazon.com Deals: http://twitter.com/amazondeals
Zappos http://twitter.com/zappos
Buy.com http://twitter.com/Buy_com 

Manufacturing
GM http://twitter.com/GMblogs
Ford http://twitter.com/FordCustService

If you want to start Twittering visit: http://www.twitter.com

Sebastian Renzi http://www.twitter.com/sebarenzi

What is High Performance Computing?

HPC is a branch of computer science that focuses on the processing of large amounts of information and the software that runs on it.
To achieve this aim HPC uses supercomputers or clusters.

Supercomputers:

A supercomputer is a computer with a high processing capacity, famous supercomputers are Cray or IBM RoadRunner.
Supercomputers have more performance than a cluster, especially in I/O operations. But also they are more expensive.

Cluster:

Cluster computing is the technique of linking 2 or more computer into a network to take advantage of the parallel processing.
Clusters are cheaper than supercomputers as they can be built with common computers,  maintenance is also more economical because the spare parts are common and they are available at very low cost.

As a consequence of this low costs, new scenarios for cluster usage have appeared.

Scenarios

From the beginning of HPC, the most common scenarios were related to gas/oil, climatology, finance, research, etc.
Now a day’s new industries are adopting HPC as a solution for their business needs. Digital cinema, 3D renderings are examples of these new scenarios.
Also companies like Ferrari are implementing HPC for predicting and preventing defects and gathering real-time information from vehicles on the road. You can find more information about Ferrari’s implementation here.

At the beginning, HPC implementations were very expensive and only governments or huge companies could cope that investment.
As I mentioned before, the cluster approach is cheaper and as a consequence of this, new scenarios are appearing. Good examples of these new scenarios are game servers and test environments.

Imagine your build server running in a clustered environment

Conclusions

Now we know a little bit more about HPC, the history and we also saw some of the typical scenarios and the new ones coming.
Implement an HPC cluster is not easy, neither impossible.

Next week I will post about Windows HPC Server 2008. Windows HPC Server 2008 is designed for high-end applications that require high performance computing clusters.

So stay tuned ..  coming soon …

Thanks !