IBM breaks speed records with new version of file system

On thursday,IBM and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced the results of "Project Fastball," a performance test of the latest release (2.3) of their General Parallel File System. GPFS was invented by IBM in 2001 as an experiment in clustered file systems, where data is accessed over multiple computers at once. Most existing file systems are designed for a single server environment, and adding more file servers does not improve performance. GPFS provides higher input/output performance by "striping" blocks of data from individual files over multiple disks, and reading and writing these blocks in parallel.

"Computing capability has been growing very fast, but the file system capacity has not kept up," IBM engineer Dr. Rama Govindaraju said.

Project Fastball achieved a new speed record of over 102 gigabytes per second of sustained read/write performance to a single file. The record was achieved using 416 individual storage controllers combined with 104 Power-based eServer p575 nodes (each p575 node has eight dual-core 2.2 GHz POWER5+ processors).

Google snaps up Writely

Since its introduction last August, Writely has acquired a devoted following. For those not familiar with it, Writely bills itself as 'The Web Word Processor'. Users create, edit, and store documents via a web browser interface with a word processor feel. Documents can be stored on Writely or on a local machine, and the application can handle Word and OpenOffice.org documents.

In a posting on Google Blog, Google let it be known that it had acquired Writely earlier this week for an undisclosed amount. Current users are still able to use the service, but those wanting to sign up for Writely will be disappointed, as new registrations are not being accepted until Writely is moved to Google's software architecture.

Writely has been in beta since its appearance last summer. It has been a free service, although Upstartle, the small development firm that created it has made it clear that some sort of fee structure would be implemented once the beta was over. Some users have hailed it as a Microsoft Word killer, which is a bit of an exaggeration. However, Writely does demonstrate the degree to which web applications have evolved, to the point where it's no longer outside to realm of possibility to conceive of some very popular desktop applications being challenged and even supplanted by web-based application.

China creates own domain names

China's Ministry of Information Industry (MII) has established a set of new top-level and second-level domain names, according to People's Daily Online, the Web site of the official People's Daily newspaper.

The new domain name system took effect as of Wednesday, according to the report. "It means Internet users don't have to surf the Web via the servers under the management of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) of the United States," the report said.

The MII has temporarily set up Chinese versions of three existing top-level domain names: ".cn", ".com" and ".net", according to the report. China's top-level domain established through ICANN is ".cn" in Roman characters.