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AndroidWorldwide mobile phone sales to end users totalled 314.7 million units in the first quarter of 2010, a 17 per cent increase from the same period in 2009, according to Gartner, Inc. Smarpthone sales to end users reached 54.3 million units, an increase of 48.7 per cent from the first quarter of 2009. Among the most successful vendors were those that controlled an integrated set of operating system (OS), hardware and services.

"In the first quarter of 2010, smartphone sales to end users saw their strongest year-on-year increase since 2006," said Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at Gartner. "This quarter saw RIM, a pure smartphone player, make its debut in the top five mobile devices manufacturers, and saw Apple increase its market share by 1.2 percentage points. Android’s momentum continued into the first quarter of 2010, particularly in North America, where sales of Android-based phones increased 707 per cent year-on-year.

Growth in the mobile devices market was driven by double-digit growth of smartphone sales in mature markets, helped by wider product availability as well as mass market price tags. "Increasing sales of white-box products in some emerging regions, in particular India, also drove sales of mobile phones upward. We expect sales of white-box products to remain very healthy for the remainder of 2010, especially outside of China,” said Ms Milanesi.

The first quarter also saw some movement outside the top five mobile handset vendor rankings (see Table 1), Hong Kong-based manufacturer G-Five made its debut into the top 10, grabbing 1.4 per cent of market share in the first quarter of 2010. The rise of white-box manufacturers from Asia has also helped the "others" section, as a proportion of overall sales, increase its market share to 19.20 per cent in the first quarter of 2010, up 2.7 percentage points. "This is having a profound effect on the top five mobile handset manufacturers’ combined share that dropped from 73.3 in the first quarter of 2009 to 70.7 per cent in the first quarter of 2010,” said Ms Milanesi.

Table 1
Worldwide Mobile Terminal Sales to End Users in 1Q10 (Thousands of Units)

Company

1Q10

 Units

1Q10 Market Share (%)

1Q09

 Units

1Q09 Market Share (%)

Nokia

110,105.6

35.0

97,398.2

36.2

Samsung

64,897.1

20.6

51,385.4

19.1

LG

27,190.1

8.6

26,546.9

9.9

RIM

10,552.5

3.4

7,233.5

2.7

Sony Ericsson

9,865.6

3.1

14,470.3

5.4

Motorola

9,574.5

3.0

16,587.3

6.2

Apple

8,359.7

2.7

3,938.8

1.5

ZTE

5,375.4

1.7

3,369.6

1.3

G-Five

4,345.0

1.4

 

 

Huawei

3,970.0

1.3

3,217.9

1.2

Others

60,418.1

19.2

44,972.2

16.5

Total

314,653.50

100.0

269,120.10

100.0

Source: Gartner (May 2010)

In the first quarter of 2010, Nokia's mobile phone sales to end users reached 110.1 million units, a 1.2 per cent decline in market share year-on-year. Although Nokia's midtier products sold well, Nokia lacks a high-volume driver in the high-end. "MeeGo based devices and other high-end products will not rejuvenate Nokia's premium portfolio until the end of the third quarter of 2010 at the earliest, and Nokia will continue to feel pressure on its average selling price (ASP) from vendors such as HTC, RIM and Samsung,” said Ms Milanesi. The reorganisation announced last week demonstrated that Nokia is trying to streamline the reporting process to deliver results quickly, which we believe shows its recognition of the pressure it faces from investors.

Samsung sold 64.9 million devices in the first quarter of 2010, an increase of 26.3 per cent year-on-year. Samsung was one of the five vendors in the top10 vendors ranking to grow its market share, which increased by 1.5 percentage points year-on-year. Samsung saw healthy margins in the first quarter of 2010 and was also able to grow its presence in developing markets such as India and the Commonwealth of Independent States.

RIM’s mobile phone sales reached 10.6 million units in the first quarter of 2010, a 45.9 per cent increase year-on-year. RIM is making its debut into the top five worldwide mobile handset manufacturers ranking. RIM's focus this quarter was centred on its ecosystem strategy, its tightly integrated control of store, OS and device played to RIM’s strengths.

Sony Ericsson sold enough units to remain in the top five mobile handset manufacturers, but its market share declined 2.3 percentage points in the first quarter of 2010. The channel held some inventory for Sony Ericsson in the first quarter of 2010 as some new products reached the channel late into the quarter. One of Sony Ericsson's most important future differentiators is its relationship with its parent company, Sony. This partnership, combined with Sony Ericsson’s ownership of the strongest portfolio it has had since 2007, place it well to lead the trend toward increasingly connected consumer devices.

The first quarter of 2010 was Apple’s strongest quarter yet, which placed the company in the No. 7 position with a 112.2 per cent increase in mobile devices sales. "Growth came partly from new communication service providers in established markets, such as the UK, and stronger sales in new markets such as China and South Korea,” said Ms Milanesi. "The second quarter of 2010 will be a very important one for Apple. We expect that Apple will present its new iPhone in June during its Worldwide Developer Conference, which will be the first to feature the latest release of the iPhone OS that includes welcome improvements for developers and users, such as multitasking.”

In the smartphone OS market, Android and Apple were the winners in the first quarter of 2010 (see Table 2). Android moved to the No. 4 position displacing Microsoft Windows Mobile for the first time. Both Android and Apple were the only two OSs vendors among the top five to increase market share year-on-year. Symbian remained in the No. 1 position but continued to lose as Nokia remains weak in the high-end portfolio.

Smartphones accounted for 17.3 per cent of all mobile handset sales in the first quarter of 2010, up from 13.6 per cent in the same period in 2009.

As seen with the iPad and web books based on Google's Android platform, mobile OS ecosystems are developing and will move beyond smartphones to continue to deliver consumer value and a rich user experience,” said Roberta Cozza, principal research analyst at Gartner.

Table 2
Worldwide Smartphone Sales to End Users by Operating System in 1Q10 (Thousands of Units)

Company

1Q10

 Units

1Q10 Market Share (%)

1Q09

 Units

1Q09 Market Share (%)

Symbian

24,069.8

44.3

17,825.3

48.8

Research In Motion

10,552.6

19.4

7,533.6

20.6

iPhone OS

8,359.7

15.4

3,848.1

10.5

Android

5,214.7

9.6

575.3

1.6

Microsoft Windows Mobile

3,706.0

6.8

3,738.7

10.2

Linux

1,993.9

3.7

2,540.5

7.0

Other OSs

404.8

0.7

445.9

1.2

Total

54,301.4

100.0

36,507.4

100.0

Source: Gartner (May 2010)

Mobile e-mail, rich messaging and social networking will continue to drive demand for smartphones and enhanced phones that feature full qwerty hardware keyboards. "To compete in such a crowded market, manufacturers need to tightly integrate hardware, user interface, and cloud and social networking services if their solutions are to appeal to users,” said Ms Cozza. "Just adding a qwerty keyboard will not make a device fit the communication’s habits of today's various consumer segments.”

Additional information is in the Gartner report "Competitive Landscape: Mobile Devices, Worldwide, 1Q10." The report is available on Gartner's website at www.gartner.com.


MandrivaThe French company Mandriva, which creates and sells the Mandriva Linux distribution, appears to be up for sale, according to information at a website dedicated to news about the distribution.

The site, Mandriva Linux Online, said the distribution had hit financial problems two years ago and things were now at a critical stage.

Two companies, LightApp and Linagora, are said to have expressed an interest in purchasing Mandriva.

The distribution began life as Mandrake Linux in 1998. It was based on Red Hat Linux, and for a long time was known as "Red Hat with KDE", a reference to the fact that the Red Hat distribution used GNOME as its desktop environment.

The name of the distribution was changed in 2005, following the loss of a case filed by Hearst Corporation which had the rights to the name. The company changed its name from MandrakeSoft to Mandriva and acquired Conectiva, another Linux company.

Financial problems are not new to the company; in 2003, it filed for bankruptcy and then emerged from that state the following year. In 2008, the company was hit hard by the global financial crisis.

But she's no outsider swooping in to take over Ubuntu Linux's corporate sponsor. She joined Canonical in June 2004, two months after previous CEO Mark Shuttleworth founded the company with a few programmers he recruited from the Debian Linux project on which Ubuntu is based.

Canonical CEO Jane SilberSince then Canonical has grown to about 320 employees and has made Ubuntu a major presence in the world of Linux--version 10.04, one of the important "long-term support" versions that arrives every two years, is due in April. It's an unusually sustained effort to make Linux a force on desktop and laptop computers, and among Canonical's accomplishments is a mainstream foothold on Dell PCs.

Canonical CEO Jane Silber

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

What hasn't changed is the company's insistence on making the version of its software it gives away for free identical to the product it supports commercially--a move that still contrasts with Linux incumbent Red Hat. And another thing: six years on, Canonical still is not profitable.

Being in the red now doesn't mean that the company--funded in part by Shuttleworth's proceeds from selling his earlier company, Thawte Consulting, to VeriSign for $575 million in 2000--doesn't plan to be in the black. Canonical has three main businesses: selling server management services to companies using Ubuntu Linux; working with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) such as Hewlett-Packard or processor companies that need help with Linux; and most recently, an Internet-based tool for buying and synchronizing music files and other personal data.

I sat down with Silber, who moved from chief operations officer to CEO on March 1, in the company's London headquarters. This is an edited transcript of our chat about desktop Linux, cloud computing, and the company's profit plans.

Q: When Canonical announced the change in management in January, you signaled that there wouldn't be a cataclysmic difference from the Shuttleworth CEO era.
Silber: This is very much a continuation of what we've been doing before. I think it's hard for people from the outside to see how Canonical has been run over the last couple years, but there has been a strong partnership. To the two of us, this feels like a natural evolution and shift in our responsibilities rather than some dramatic knife-edge change. My role is to lead and drive us to accomplish the same goals on the same strategies we've had over the last couple years.

So if little is changing, what was the reason?
Silber: Canonical is changing in its life cycle. We're maturing as an organization. We're six years old now. We are 320 people--of that order. We have a much more robust set of relationships with partners and customers and the open-source community, and the type of work we're doing is different now and needs a different type of leadership and focus. It's the type of focus I'd like to bring. Mark has gotten more interested in elements of product design and strategy, and he's gotten more focused there. What the organization needs now we believe fits more naturally into the new sets of roles and responsibilities than the old ones. It allows both of us to focus where our strengths and interests are and on what Canonical needs at this stage in its life.

Start-ups often change from the visionary founding leaders to new management that focuses more on execution and operations. Is this that transition for Canonical?
Silber: It's part of that. We are still a very visionary organization. The work we're doing is still very disruptive. Some of the work we're doing on cloud computing on the server side is visionary. We are still breaking the model, exploring the boundaries between commercial and community. An element of this was about a drive toward operational excellence--benefiting from the foundation we've built over the last five years.

Investors who might not see eye to eye with management often pressure start-ups, but Canonical has funding from Mark Shuttleworth.
Silber: We are a for-profit company. We have product goals and technical goals that have been the case in the past and will continue to be the case on my watch.

"We are not going out trying to target Red Hat customers and convert them to Ubuntu. Our main opportunity is in a different area than the one where they traditionally play."

But is there more urgency about profit now?
Silber: There is a sense of great opportunity right now. When we started Ubuntu in year one, we didn't put a strong push on trying to sell Canonical services, not because we were not interested, but it's hard to build a business around selling services around an operating system that nobody is using. We knew we needed to gain a user base and momentum before we could sell services. That user base is now there. There is urgency and momentum around that at a level we hadn't necessarily seen in the first couple years.

I've heard for years that Linux on the desktop will catch on, and it's had some modest success among programmers and developing countries. Where is it popular, where will is going to be popular, and where are you going to make it popular?
Silber: Is this the "Is 2010 the year of the Linux desktop" question?

I'm not going to go that far. Mac OS X is not the market-leading operating system, but it's reasonably successful. You can have success that isn't 90 percent of the market.
Silber: Creating a platform to get vastly widespread consumer use takes time. Nothing in that platform-changing realm will happen overnight. I think there are signs of change. We notice a dramatic change even in dealings with OEMs. If you think about the hardware ecosystem--the process of developing new components that find their way to end-users' hands--changing the dynamics of that industry. Where their staff is trained, where they drive product management from where innovation happens. There's a subtle but really important change happening across that whole ecosystem.

We see companies now having operating system that five years ago you'd never think needed an operating system. There's still going to be a lot of change in that industry. Lots of people today are trying things. Some things are going to work, a lot are not, it's going to be very dynamic over the next couple years. But what we're seeing is the result of the opportunities that open source and Linux have provided. The opportunity for choice and for innovation is coming out. In these disruptive environments, there's opportunity, and we think Ubuntu is at the forefront of that.

It seems like Netbooks would be pretty high on that list.
Silber: Netbooks are high on the list. I was at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona a couple weeks ago walking around the floor. It's primarily a mobile conference, but similar to what you'd see at places like CES where most of the products you see being shown are Linux-based and coming from quarters that traditionally have accepted other people's software products and put them together. There's so much activity in the area of taking what has been a Linux desktop and spreading it across that spectrum of form factors, from desktops to laptops to Netbooks. I think Ubuntu plays across all that spectrum. We have a core with common technology. It allows us to span that spectrum efficiently.

It seems to me Netbooks got a lot more popular once Windows began to show up on them. People are familiar with Windows, and they have software they want to run. I see Linux-based Netbooks coming out Taiwan, but I'm not convinced they're succeeding in a big way.
Silber: I think broadly as a category they're succeeding in the marketplace. There's exploration going on in terms of where the sweet spot is. Some companies are trying to discover where their skill set is. Lots of companies think they can make an OS, and they don't have that DNA in the company to really do that. There's exploration and experimentation happening. It produces a lot of devices and projects which aren't going to have a lot of staying power.

Linux has been successful in the server market. That's where Red Hat made its business. What are you doing differently to crack the server market?
Silber: Our main opportunity is in the cloud, both as a guest OS and in the infrastructure-host OS piece. I'm sure you're familiar with our partnership with Eucalyptus to build Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud?

Basically an in-house version of Amazon Web Services.
Silber: Right. It allows a company to build its own private cloud behind a firewall. That plays to our strengths for a number of reasons, including the simple fact that Ubuntu instances are free. You want to scale up, you want to burst? That's very hard in a Red Hat model where you need a licensed subscription for each of those instances. There's a good match between the inherent characteristics of that sort of cloud computing and Ubuntu. We're seeing a lot of interest there.

Red Hat is a great company that is going to be around and has a good business model in certain areas. We are not going out trying to target Red Hat customers and convert them to Ubuntu. Our main opportunity is in a different area than the one where they traditionally play.

So if using Ubuntu is free, where does the revenue come in?
Silber: Support and management services. Those instances, whether they're cloud instances or virtual instances, need some management services. This is our Landscape product offering. Landscape comes in two forms. One is a software as a service that we host. We also have something called Landscape Dedicated Server, which is an on-site version. There's a slightly different pricing model for that. It's basically per-machine under management.

Your third big business is Ubuntu One. Where is the money coming in there?
Silber: That's our newest business unit. The core offering is the storage and syncing capability. That is a freemium-based model. A certain amount of storage is free, and there's a subscription for larger amounts of storage. With Ubuntu 10.04, we're introducing Ubuntu One music store, which is through a partner providing the digital content. It's a purchasing MP3 model.

One of the most fascinating things now facing desktop operating system companies is cloud computing. For Linux in particular, it seems a blessing and a curse. It gets around a lot of the application availability problems. Quicken is a great example. For years people would say, "Oh, there's no Quicken on Linux." With Mint, now there's Quicken on Linux--with a lot of qualifiers, but you get the idea. The curse is the operating system just becomes a piece of the stack, down there below, not something that the end users even is recognize is there necessarily. It's not as much an opportunity to sell in one way or another to end users. How do you see it?
I think ultimately it's a benefit. It certainly is a changing dynamic. I'm not sure how many people will go completely into the cloud in the near future. This is a pendulum that swings back and forth from local client apps to centralized apps somewhere else that may or may not be under your control. The sweet spot is in that middle ground. It's naive to think everything will always be running on your machine locally, but it's equally naive to think everything will move to the cloud. The challenge for us is playing to strength, finding that sweet spot for the Ubuntu user base, what they need and want, and providing an appropriate set of local applications and Web-based services.

"Creating a platform to get vastly widespread consumer use takes time. Nothing in that platform-changing realm will happen overnight. I think there are signs of change."

I've seen the pendulum, too, with time-sharing and whatnot. But the Internet strikes me as profoundly different from the old days of running stuff on a server, the green-screen terminal days. It's just so pervasive and you must be connected to it for a bunch of routine things, even if you're not jumping into cloud computing whole hog. I don't know where that pendulum is going to end up, but it seems it's going to be a lot more toward the cloud.
Silber: It's not something we're fighting against. We're trying to leverage this opportunity rather than cower in a defensive corner. For instance, another 10.04 feature is an initiative we're calling Social from the Start, which is making desktop this social gateway to your social networks, to your online life, in a very seamless integrated manner. One of the key features is what term the Me menu, a menu in the top panel bar. With just one click, it'll drop down and let you post to Twitter, Identica, Facebook, in a very simple, elegantly integrated into the desktop interface. It's that merging of online worlds and your local desktop world we think is very interesting.

Linux has been persistently popular with software developers. There's a lot of benefit there to having serious local computing horsepower when you're compiling your code. What are some other examples of software running locally where Ubuntu can make a difference? You don't have Photoshop, you don't have Final Cut Pro, you don't have a large number of games.
Silber: A lot of things related to media are still very valuable in a local perspective. The notion of being able to have access to your content locally, even if you're using a cloud-based application to deal with that, is very compelling to people. There are environments still, while we are moving to pervasively connected online world, there are still instances where you want offline horsepower to do things as simple as editing documents.

You mentioned Photoshop. The open-source community has really powerful photo tools like the GIMP. Inkscape is a great app for illustrations. There are a number of strong client applications like that. There are a number of good Web-based implementations of tools like that as well.

When you look at your three big business, OEM, customer support, and Ubuntu One, what are the ones that are going to bring you into the black?
Silber: It's going to be a combination of those three. Our OEM relationships are going from strength to strength. Some of the work we've done in the last couple years in terms of aligning hardware ecosystems around Ubuntu, getting people to enable various components on Ubuntu, are really starting to pay off now. When somebody wants to put together a computer, the components they're selecting from all work with Ubuntu as the base Linux platform. That's taking off in a very significant way.

Online services is a newer business unit. We have a ways to go there. It's not as mature as our OEM services offering, and in some areas, we're still finding out what's going to be successful. With corporate services we have a solid base of enterprise users now, and I think the cloud in the next couple years is going to make that grow quite substantially.

Under your management, is the profitability push going to be stronger than it has been under Mark Shuttleworth?
Silber: Certainly driving us to profitability is one of my important goals. People might not give Mark credit for how much that was one of his priorities.

It was clear to me it was a priority. It just wasn't clear when it was going to happen.
Silber: We are closer to it now than we have been before. I'm determined to drive us there. But it has been a priority for Canonical all along. It is one of my focal areas as I take on this job.


The SCO Group is to receive 2 million dollars from a group of investors headed by majority shareholder Ralph Yarro. Following an oral hearing, the Delaware bankruptcy court dealing with SCO has approved the loan. This means that the company now has sufficient funds for the pending jury trial against Novell. The trial, which is to address rights to Unix and the legality of protective licences for Linux users, is set to start today and is expected to last three weeks.

At the hearing, SCO was able to persuade the judge that the loan offered by a group of investors headed by Ralph Yarro represented the best of twelve offers. The injection of funds will incur interest at 6.6 per cent, which compares well with one competitor offer which set out an interest rate of 10 per cent. That offer would also have seen charges imposed for setting up the loan – the Yarro offer does not impose set-up charges.

As well as the details of the loan, SCO presented a two-part business plan for the next 13 weeks developed under administrator Edward Cahn. The two parts are the software business, which is generating revenues, and the litigation business, which has so far generated only costs. Without the loan, it would, according to Cahn, not have been possible to continue litigation. Once the trial between SCO and Novell ends at the end of this month, SCO will have sufficient funds to repay the loan – assuming it wins the case. Regarding further restructuring of the troubled company, Cahn also told the court that he had visited the company's subsidiaries in the UK and Germany and it should soon be possible to close these down. The bankruptcy court approved the transactions.


NTFS-3GTuxera, the Finnish company behind open-source file system NTFS-3G, has announced a confidential intellectual-property deal with Microsoft, under which it will be permitted to carry on distributing its open-source NTFS product and to offer new exFAT drivers.

Tuxera said on Wednesday that it is also joining the Interop Vendor Alliance, a Microsoft-led collaborative forum for interoperability with Microsoft systems.

"The confidential Intellectual Property Agreement is basically about patents and giving us access to some Windows source code," Tuxera chief executive Mikko Välimäki told ZDNet UK. "ExFAT is part of the forthcoming SDCX standard for flash cards, and we'll be selling our driver to OEMs for devices like cameras."

ExFAT is an extension of Microsoft's FAT file system, and is considered by Microsoft to be complementary to NTFS, the standard file system in Windows.

"We're talking to Microsoft about an open-source exFAT driver, but that's not covered by the agreement. We cannot sell end-user proprietary drivers, we can only sell exFAT on Linux to OEMs at present," Välimäki said.

The Tuxera chief executive added that the company has a dual-licensing policy with NTFS, with its proprietary version having features tailored and optimised for specific purposes that aren't in the GPL'd open-source version.

When asked whether there were patent issues with NTFS, Välimäki said: "Microsoft has never publically said anything about patent issues with NTFS... Our open-source NTFS driver has been available for 10 years, and our commercial driver for two."

"We'll be licensing our Linux NTFS under the GPL, and we have an agreement with Microsoft. If you're a user, you don't need to worry about Microsoft. We'll deal with them directly," he added.


HAMBURG, Germany—The 33rd edition of the TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers is still led by Roadrunner and Jaguar, but shows that two of the top 10 positions are now claimed by new systems in Germany. The latest listing, to be announced Tuesday, June 23, at the 2009 International Supercomputing Conference, also includes a brand-new player, an IBM BlueGene/P system at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia, ranked at No. 14.

The closely watched TOP500 list, issued twice a year, both confers bragging rights on research institutions and manufacturers and serves as a valuable tool for tracking trends in supercomputer performance and architectures. The latest list reflects changes from November 2008 to June 2009.

Holding onto the No. 1 spot with 1.105 petaflop/s (quadrillions of floating point operations per second) is the Roadrunner system at DOE’s Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) which was built by IBM and in June 2008 became the first system ever to break the petaflop/s Linpack barrier. It still is one of the most energy efficient systems on the TOP500.

Maintaining its hold on second place is the Cray XT5 Jaguar system installed at the DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Jaguar reached 1.059 petaflop/s shortly after its installation but due to its heavy workload no further measurements were possible.

But in third place, a new contender has emerged-- a new IBM BlueGene/P system called JUGENE and installed at the Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ) in Germany. It achieved 825.5 teraflop/s (trillions of floating point operations per second) on the Linpack benchmarks and has a theoretical peak performance of just above 1 petaflop/s. FZJ is also home to the new No. 10 system. Called JUROPA, it is built from Bull Novascale and Sun SunBlade x6048 servers and achieved 274.8 Tflop/s.

The two systems in Germany are the only non-U.S.-based systems in the latest TOP10 list. There are only two other new entries in the TOP10. At No. 6 is a new Cray XT5 system called Kraken and installed at the National Institute for Computational Sciences at the University of Tennessee with a Linpack performance of 463.3 Tflop/s, making it the most powerful university-based system. The other new entry, at No. 9 with 415.7 Tflop/s, is a new IBM BlueGene/P system called Dawn installed at DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Another notable system is the Chinese-built Dawning 5000A at the Shanghai Supercomputer Center at No 15. It is the largest system which can be operated with the Windows HPC 2008 operating system.

The U.S. is clearly the leading consumer of HPC systems with 291 of the 500 systems (unchanged from 291). The European share (145 systems – down from 151) is settling down after having risen for some time, but is still substantially larger than the Asian share (49 systems – up from 47).

Energy Efficiency and Other Trends

As energy efficiency becomes a more critical issue for supercomputing centers, the TOP500 list now provides data on energy use, expressed as the number of megaflop/s per watt. While the most energy efficient supercomputers are based on IBM QS22 Cell processor blades (up to 536 Mflop/watt), A GRAPE-DR custom accelerator system (429 Mflop/watt) and IBM BlueGene/P systems (up to 372 Mflop/watt), the Intel quad-core blades are catching up fast, with the Nehalem-based system achieving up to 273 Mflops/watt and Harpertown-based systems up to 265 Mflop/watt.

While the average power consumption of a TOP10 system is 2.45 megawatts and is unchanged from six months ago, average power efficiency is 280 Mflops/watt –up from 228 Mflops/watt over the same period. Average power consumption of a TOP500 system is 386 kilowatts and average power efficiency is 150 Mflops/watt.

Here are other trends and highlights from the 33rd TOP500 List:

  • Hewlett-Packard kept a narrow lead in market share by total systems from IBM, but IBM still stays ahead by overall installed performance.
  • Cray’s XT system series is very popular for big customers 10 systems in the TOP50 (20 percent).
  • Quad-core processor-based systems have taken over the TOP500 quite rapidly and are found in 383 systems. 102 systems are using dual-core processors, and only four systems still use single core processors. Already four systems use IBMs advanced Sony PlayStation 3 processor with 9 cores and two systems at Cray are using the new six-core Shanghai AMD Opteron processors.  The Linpack benchmark can utilize multi-core processors very well, which led to performance levels increasing above average across the whole list.
  • The entry level to the list moved up to the 17.1 Tflop/s mark on the Linpack benchmark, compared to 12.64 Tflop/s six months ago.
  • The last system on the newest list would have been listed at position 274 in the previous TOP500 just six months ago. This turnover rate is gain just above average after the TOP500 recorded the highest turnover in its history one year ago.
  • Total combined performance of all 500 systems has grown to 22.6 Pflop/s, compared to 16.95 Pflop/s six months ago and 11.7 Pflop/s one year ago.
  • A total of 399 systems (79.8 percent) are now using Intel processors. This is slightly up from six months ago (379 systems, 75.8 percent). Intel continues to provide the processors for the largest share of TOP500 systems.
  • The IBM Power processors are the second most commonly used processor family with 55 systems (11 percent), down from 60.
  • They are followed by the AMD Opteron family with 43 systems (8.6 percent), down from 59.

The TOP500 list is compiled by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany; Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.


Apply all of the browser, application and OS patches you want, your machine still can be completely and silently compromised at the lowest level--without the use of any vulnerability.

That was the rather sobering message delivered by a pair of security researchers from Core Security Technologies in a talk at the CanSecWest conference on methods for infecting the BIOS with persistent code that will survive reboots and reflashing attempts. Anibal Sacco and Alfredo Ortega (above) demonstrated a method for patching the BIOS with a small bit of code that gave them conplete control of the machine. And the best part is, the method worked on a Windows machine, a PC running OpenBSD and another running VMware Player.

"It was very easy. We can put the code wherever we want," said Ortega. "We're not using a vulnerability in any way. I'm not sure if you understand the impact of this. We can reinfect the BIOS every time it reboots."

Sacco and Ortega stressed that in order to execute the attacks, you need either root privileges or physical access to the machine in question, which limits the scope. But the methods are deadly effective and the pair are currently working on a BIOS rootkit to implement the attack.

"We can patch a driver to drop a fully working rootkit. We even have a little code that can remove or disable antivirus," Ortega said.

The work by the Core team follows on to research done on persistent rootkits by John Heasman of NGSS, who was able to devise a method for placing rootkits on PCs using the memory space on PCI cards. In a presentation at Black Hat DC in 2007, Heasman showed a completely working method for loading the malware on to a PCI card by using the flashable ROM on the device. He also had a way to bypass the Windows NT kernel and create fake stack pointers.

In an interview at the time, he told me: "At that point it's game over. We're executing 32-bit code in ring zero."

As application and operating system protection mechanisms continue to become more sophisticated and more difficult to evade, expect to see more and more attacks targeting the hardware and low-level software, where there are still opportunities for success.



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