Well, not a whole lot going on in the tech world this weekend, but I did manage to catch this headline.

IBM's new supercomputer family, Blue Gene, will be running Linux. The first computer in the series, Blue Gene/L, will contain 65,000 processors and 16 trillion bytes of memory. The US$100 million system will be able to perform 200 trillion calculations per second, and will be used to simulate the effects of nuclear weapons. Even more interesting: Microsoft was not even an option for consideration.

"We had two choices of operating systems for the Blue Gene family, either use a special-purpose system or Linux," Bill Pulleyblank, director of Exploratory Server Systems at IBM Research, said in a statement. "We chose Linux because it's open and because we believed it could be extended to run a computer the size of Blue Gene. We saw considerable advantage in using an operating system supported by the open-source community, so that we can get their input and feedback."