For all the money and effort poured into supercomputers, their lifespans can be brutally short. See IBM's Roadrunner as a textbook example: the 116,640-core cluster was smashing records just five years ago, and yet it's already considered so behind the times that Los Alamos
National Laboratory is taking it out of action today. Don't mourn too
much for the one-time legend, however. The blend of Opteron and Cell processors proved instrumental to understanding energy flow in weapons while also advancing the studies of HIV, nanowires and the known universe.
Roadrunner should even be useful in its last gasps, as researchers will
have a month to experiment with the system's data routing and OS memory
compression before it's dismantled in earnest. It's true that the
supercomputer has been eclipsed by cheaper, faster or greener
competitors, including its reborn Cray arch-nemesis -- but there's no question that we'll have learned from Roadrunner's brief moment in the spotlight.
LG plans to launch a flexible OLED smartphone before the end of the year, the company’s VP of mobile has confirmed, though it’s unclear to what extent the work-in-progress handset will actually flex. The OLED panel in question is the handiwork of LG Display according to VP of LG mobile Yoon Bu-hyun, the WSJ reports, with the proposed device set to launch sometime in Q4. LG Display’s work on flexible OLEDs has been underway for some time, though the company’s efforts have perhaps been overshadowed somewhat by rival Samsung’s YOUM development. Last year, according to a Korea Times report, LG Display was preparing for
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