With the holiday season right around the corner, many companies are putting the finishing touches on this year’s big projects or looking ahead to data center management and IT strategies for next year. This week saw a number of developments in tech hardware and innovation that highlight some of the industry’s exciting changes.
Top Supercomputers Gain More Superpowers
Data center management strategists dealing with high-performing computers take note – the latest rankings compiled by the Top500 list of the world’s highest-performing supercomputers highlight a few interesting trends. InfoWorld reported that the top 17 entrants in the rankings are responsible for 50 percent of the power produced by all 500 computers on the list, combining for more than 250 petaflops per second. The top performer was the Tianhe-2 supercomputer, located in China, which produced 33.86 petaflops a second. The increasing top-heaviness of the list, Top500 analysts said, has resulted in a wider disparity between the highest-performing data centers and the next tiers. Many large enterprises and governments are driving this development, as they focus on building a few massive facilities instead of multiple smaller ones.
Fastest-Growing Cities for IT Jobs Include Unexpected Locales
As widely-known areas for data center management and IT jobs like Silicon Valley and San Francisco experience flatter growth, several secondary markets offer fast-rising job opportunities, reported Forbes. The Austin metro region of Texas, which includes Round Rock and San Marcos, experienced the highest rise in job creation rates between 2001 and 2013, with employment climbing 41 percent during the period. Other top-ranking areas for job growth include the Raleigh-Cary, N.C., area, the Houston-Sugarland-Baytown, Texas region, and the Nashville-Franklin-Murfreesboro, Tenn., area. Many of these jobs are not at companies that are primarily tech companies – job opportunities for software developers, for example, are rising in industries such as manufacturing and finance.
Bitcoin Receives Accolades at First-Ever Congressional Hearing
Data center management personnel could soon be dealing more with virtual currencies. Bitcoin, the peer-to-peer digital currency that has seen widespread attention of late, was the subject of a Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee hearing this week. The first such federal conference to examine the possibilities and concerns related to Bitcoin engendered some support of the technology, with leaders such as Sen. Tom Carper drawing comparisons between the currency’s development and the inchoate stages of the Internet. The process of potentially integrating the “crypto-currency” into the U.S. would also help the country contribute to and help shape its secure, intelligent growth.
