In the 60 year history of computers, there has been a constant improvement of computational speed.  Ever faster has always been one of the driving metrics of the industry.  Moore’s Law has been manifested with desktops and laptops to the point where the computers we use are as fast as we need.  The machines we use today are incredibly faster that those we used at the turn of the century.  The power of these machines however is dwarfed by the super computers now being developed.

It is in the arena of super computers that both the outer and inner reaches of reality can be explored.  The advanced computer modeling and the running of complex scenarios and of course the ability to beat a human chess grandmaster is the realm of super computers.

The world’s fastest computer is being built and installed at the Argonne National Laboratory in the western suburbs of Chicago. IBM Corp. and the Department of Energy, which owns Argonne, have contracted for a new supercomputer that is now being installed with a peak capability of 445 teraflops, or 445 trillion calculations per second. The current record-holder is the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which has an IBM Blue Gene/L with a peak capability of about 360 teraflops….

Google has now made the long awaited announcement that it would be entering the wireless arena.  It was not a product, or “Google Phone” roll-out, but rather the announcement of OHA, or the Open Handset Alliance.  OHA(my choice to come up with an acronym as the full name sounds a bit too bureaucratic and almost Orwellian for me to type it a lot) is the next step in the globalization of connectivity and something I have anticipated and expected for a couple of years.

On this blog, and at conferences I point to the fact that it is the cell phone that is the true global technology. I have written about the explosive growth and sheer numbers of devices, of the technological innovation and how the cell phone has found a seat at the table of major media.  OHA takes the logical next step which is to break up the walled gardens of carriers and software suppliers.  Incompatibility is at odds with a world of  ever increasing connectedness.  Universality is one of the touch stones of our wireless future.  Another is the ongoing commoditization of the entire business pushing costs ever lower for the consumer.  OHA will facilitate both of these inevitable trends.

Google of course is doing this for business reasons.  They hope to dominate the mobile advertising marketplace the way they currently dominate the on-line one.  In addition, they seem to have a strong desire to attack the business constructs of Microsoft and other companies that sell …