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Top 5 Data Center Stories, Week of April 6

The Week in Review: A closer look at two powerful supercomputers, Blue Waters and the ALMA Correlator, Internap is best-perfoming data center stock in the first quarter, how storage is shaping the evolution of cloud infrastructure.

bluewaters-ecophlex

The piping for the ECOPhlex cooling system for the Blue Waters supercomputer, which uses both water and refrigerants. (Photo: NCSA)

For your weekend reading, here’s a recap of five noteworthy stories that appeared on Data Center Knowledge this past week. Enjoy!

The World's Highest Data Center - High atop the Chajnantor Plateau in the Chilean Andes, at more than 16,500 feet above sea level, a unique supercomputer brings the heavens into focus. Here, at the world’s highest data center, sits the ALMA Correlator, a powerful system that allows a system of high-altitude antennas separated by up to 16 kilometers to work together as a single giant telescope.

Blue Waters Supercomputer Debuts At 11.6 Petaflops - Less than two years after a reboot to switch vendors, one of America’s most ambitious supercomputing projects has gone live. The $350 million Blue Waters supercomputer, which was dedicated last week at the University of Illinois’ National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), was envisioned as the new frontier in American supercomputing technology. Officials at the NCSA said the completed machine has delivered on that vision.

Internap Leads Data Center Stocks in First Quarter - Internap was the best performing data center stock in the first three months of 2013. Shares of the the Atlanta-based colocation provider soared 34.9 percent on the quarter, as strong earnings made it the standout performer in a decidedly mixed quarter for the data center sector.

EMS: Big Data Crunching in a Small Package - The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is using a mobile enclosure from Elliptical Mobile Solutions (EMS) for conducting sensitive research into the safety of space tourism.

How Storage is Shaping The Cloud Data Center - Because of these new initiatives and new ways to deliver data, the data center has been forced to evolve to support more agile and scalable platforms. Part of the conversation revolves around unified computing systems, while the other part revolves around something even more specific: storage.

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