A research fellow at Fujitsu, speaking in InfoWorld, says that the company is the first chip manufacturer to commit to using carbon in place of copper. Nanotubes carry mitigate electrons’ tendency to leak out of copper wires, transmit electrons 10 times faster, and dissipate heat more readily, according to Fujitsu’s Yuji Awano.

More on the company’s nanotech strategy from the house magazine.

Computerworld reports that early this month Sun rolled out:

pay-per-use computing power and data storage and new software packages tailored for specific projects, the latest move in the network computer maker’s turnaround strategy.

At least the accounting’s easy. One hour of processor time runs you $1. One gig of storage is a buck per month. The first large-scale users are purported to be from the financial and oil and gas sectors. No word on who the first users to pull out due to security concerns will be.

Watch the Sun King (or at least the Sun President) give a demo. Or if you’re not into tech company royalty, read the product page.

From CNN:

Hewlett-Packard Co. Chairman and CEO Carly Fiorina, one of the most powerful women in corporate America, is leaving the troubled computer maker after being forced out by its board. Fiorina, the only female CEO at a company in the Dow Jones industrial average, had been with the HP since 1999. But the company’s controversial deal to buy Compaq in the spring of 2002 — after a bruising proxy fight led by one of the Hewlett family heirs — has not produced the shareholder returns or profits she had promised.

Supercomputing Online today has an article about Univa — the recently launched provider of Globus software, support, and services — adding a VP of Product Management, Vas Vasiliadis . According to another blurb, Univa execs will also (naturally enough) be presenting at GlobusWORLD next week in Boston.

Big Blue devotes the current issue of IBM Systems Journal to grid computing. It includes a paper on IBM’s intraGrid, which is based on Globus. It also predicts (get ready for it) the rapid adoption of grids by industry and analyzes the evolution of grid standards and principles.

The hits keep on coming with pieces on security, information infrastructure, and the National Library of Medicine MYMED database system, among other things. And the cover art–ooo laa laa!

Check out the full table of contents.

Steve Lohr of the New York Times writes about how the Globus Consortium is working to accelerate the adoption of Grid computing by the business world. This is the first I’ve heard of the consortium, but the main point of the story is one that seems to pop up in the mainstream press periodically: grid computing or the tools of grid and high-performance computing are now making their way into the “mainstream” of business.