MANILA, Philippines -- Today’s supercomputers are tomorrow’s netbooks.

Today, supercomputers lord it over their smaller and less powerful computing brethren. Processor technology, however, is evolving at a blistering pace. And it could mean that these cutting-edge computing platforms will soon see themselves eating some future wonder-computers’ digital dust.

Since the 1960s, supercomputers have been doing processor-heavy tasks, such as calculating, estimating, testing hypotheses, and forecasting in the fields of quantum physics, climatology, molecular modeling, and so on. In fact, without these computing behemoths, some if not most of today’s scientific advances would have been impossible to achieve.

But as strong and fast as they are, today’s supercomputers will certainly be outperformed by some future super-supercomputers.

Fujitsu’s Commercial Supercomputer

Fujitsu just kicked China off the top of the world’s supercomputer list with its PRIMEHPC FX10.

Destined for commercial sale in markets including those outside Japan, the FX10 can scale up to 23.2petaflops, more than twice the capability of the K supercomputer, announced earlier by Fujitsu in partnership with Japan’s RIKEN.

Available by January 2012, the FX10 is ideal for companies that need a supercomputer for large-scale simulation studies, such as those in medical research, energy analysis, and weather forecasting.

Helpless vs. Cyber-attacks?

Online criminals are becoming more brazen, their cyber-attacking skills getting more sophisticated and harder, more expensive to defend against.

Companies and organizations are finding it harder to ward off or mitigate cybercriminals’ attacks, a study by F5 Networks shows. About one-third of respondents in the company’s survey of senior IT managers worldwide said that conventional cyber-defenses are no match against increasingly complex attacks.

Some of these attacks include network-layer denial-of-service attacks and unauthorized access to encrypted data.

Hmm. Does it mean we have to throw in the towel?

Broadband for Poor Households

Here is something that our local cable TV companies should emulate, this corner hopes.

Showing their support for the U.S. federal government’s push to connect more homes to broadband Internet, cable companies plan to offer Internet service for $9.95 (about 420 pesos). The initiative, however, only covers homes with children eligible for the federal government’s school-lunch program.

Connect-to-Compete is an organization of companies and nonprofit groups seeking to reduce the number of U.S. homes that do not have access to broadband Internet.

Microsoft is also part of the organization.

I hope something like this also emerges in this country.

Google Adds

Google+ is expected to have more than 60 million users by the fourth quarter of 2011.

The online search giant’s addition of pages for brands to its social networking venture is expected to drive this expansion in user base.

That’s all for the meantime, folks. Join me again next time as we keep on watching IT.