IBM contract signing

As the Good Doctor has noted, the worst kept secret in the world is finally out: IBM are supplying the next supercomputer.

The PR piece is rather dull, despite mention of a few numbers, but what is interesting is the way that it refers to the Top 500 — not something that would have happened had a vector system won! — and the way that it mentions that the system is expected to be the second most powerful machine in the UK. This latter, I take as a poke at EC, which seems quite unfair given that they've already got their machine in and working, whilst some of us are still waiting to get the plumbing sorted out...

Henry Wood's transcriptions

I've mentioned my fascination with transcriptions before, so it shouldn't be much of a surprise that I really liked the Henry Wood orchestral arrangements played in today's prom.

The Klenovsky arrangement of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D-minor took huge liberties with the original, but in a way that seemed to me to be rather more successful than the Stokowski version. The equally extreme orchestration of Rachmaninov's C-sharp minor prelude was either an act of genius or an act of madness but either way, I enjoyed hearing Sergei Vasilievich's showy piano piece in a new way, even if I'm not sure whether I'd want to listen to it again and again...