Some 300 sites dropped off the TOP500 list overall or upgraded. This is more than ever before. Intel's Richard Dracott asked himself how come at the ISC'08 Press Conference. The quad core IA has gone up to 253. Multi-core is the real disruptive technology for the TOP500.

Nehalem is the new innovative architecture on 2, 4 or 8 cores. The features include an integrated memory controller, a quick path interconnect, 2-way simultaneous multi-threading, micro-architecture enhancements, dynamic power management, SSE 4.2. It will go into production in Quarter 4 of 2008.

In the Hot Seat Session there was a brief reference at CERN, where one is chasing the intractable. The institution

ventures into the subatomic world to unveil its inner workings with the latest experiment: the Large Hydron Collider.

The data analysis grid for LHC revolutionizes the way scientists share and analyse data.

The Openlab collaboration is essential for building the IT infrastructure. Intel contributes in a unique technology collaboration since 2003.

Richard Dracott announced that Westmere and Sandy Bridge architectures are coming up. And 22 nm is on track.

The big issue in HPC is the multi-core versus many-core vision. Multi-core is built either on nothing but large cores or on nothing but small cores and thus discrete. Many-core architecture is a mixture of large and small cores and therefore integrated.

There is one model for SW development. CPU/GPU have different compilers. There is no flexibility nor standards.