This week we heard from supercomputer rivals, and also saw the final appearance of Intel’s “Poulson” Itanium silicon. From the point of view of this blog, the interesting thing is these announcements made very little mention of cooling or energy efficiency. At more than 20 Petaflops, the Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge is the world’s fastest. It’s an AMD-based machine, with NVidia Tesla GPUs that do the donkey work - and it’s air-cooled. An upgrade of the previous Jaguar machine, Titan simply re-uses the power

New Yorkers have a stiff upper lip that any Brit would envy. They also give lip. They mouth off way better than we could dream of. So when a disaster hit the City, killing 41 people, heroes came out in force to save lives and keep things going. And the arguments kicked off. Mayor Bloomberg had to cancel the New York marathon for the first time ever. Not because it couldn’t be done - this is New York, remember, they can do anything - but because the arguments were set to drown out everything else. Bloomberg also threw his weight behind the Obama presidential campaign. This wasn’t just because the President’s response to the disaster was so much better than Bush’s post-Katrina performance, but because of global warming.

Last week I went to a very interesting meeting of solar industry people. Data centers didn’t get a specific look-in: the issue was how to get solar projects funded as the UK government changes its policies around energy generation.

Solar power will get cheaper as the panels get mass produced, but in the early stages, it is not affordable enough to produce the kind of mass market that will really bring prices down. The UK’s solar business has been doing reasonably well - but it seems that the Chinese government has decided that China should own the industry and is pricing and marketing accordingly.

This week, everyone’s been looking at the images of Google’s data centers, but what have we learned? In a nutshell, we now know that if you put a top-rank professional photographer inside eight data centers, she can make a great data-center photo story - and great PR for Google. Connie Zhou got the job - and can now be called “the Annie Liebowitz of data centers”. Journalists who trudge round data centers can only look on jealously. We do our best with our pix, but we snatch them on lightning tours, while juggling notebooks and recorders to take note of the facts.

I am very used to the idea that the cloud means data can be held, carried and processed anywhere. I’ve stopped using word processing packages on my own machines except in very desperate situations. I know I can’t access the cloud on a plane, but I rarely fly anywhere, and when I do, I sleep most of the flight. . The fact that my data is somewhere else may have some small downsides - occasionally slow responses, and very occasional data loss. But, the upside is, it allows me to be disorganised. Get interrupted and put down a piece of work on one system, and I can pick it up on another one. Bigger organisations seem to be understanding this more slowly. BMW, for instance apparently had to do extensive testing before it decided it was OK to ship its high-performance computing (HPC) jobs off to Iceland.