PC World | There's an international race to build an exascale computer--a project that is estimated to cost billions of dollars. At the Department of Energy, Peter Beckman is leading the effort.

Nature News | Two studies published in Nature reveal why promising melanoma drug PLX4032 fails in some patients and how tumors' resistance to the drug may be overcome.

Boston Globe | Paul Allen, cofounder of Microsoft, is funding biotech with $9.4 million in grants. The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation has awarded seven three-year grants to Allen Distinguished Investigators, in what could become an ongoing program. The grants are focused on biotech and basic neuroscience and are meant for cutting-edge research projects.

PC World | China may have taken top honors in the most recent Top500 listing, but IBM walked away with another award: the world's most energy-efficient supercomputer.

Washington Business Journal | The Ignite Institute, originally planned for Northern Virginia, appears to be headed instead to Philadelphia and the Fox Chase Cancer Center.

Bio-IT World | Backing up the claim that cloud computing is its top strategic priority, Microsoft marked the beginning of this year’s Supercomuting conference (SC10) that by porting the sequence aligner BLAST to Windows Azure, it is releasing a major protein dataset that should not only be of value to researchers in its own right but also demonstrate the potential value of Microsoft’s Azure Cloud to the bioscience community.

New York Times | Dr. Robert Lue of Harvard is animating the cell. A pioneer in molecular animation, Lue and others are applying computer-based animation from the film industry to biology.

InformationWeek | China bests the US in the most recent Top500 list of the fastest supercomputers in the world. China's Tianhe-1A system in Tianjin achieved 2.57 petaflops per second to earn first place.

Bloomberg | EMC announced yesterday that it had purchased Isilon Systems for $2.25 billion, pushing it deeper into the external-storage market.

Xconomy | Complete Genomics' IPO this week came in lower than they had expected. Originally predicting $12-$14 per share, the initial prices was $9 per share and stock fell 11% the first day of trading, closing at $8.03.

Med Page Today | Findings published in the New England Journal of Medicine pinpoint a gene with multiple mutations that seems to determine patient response to acute myeloid leukemia (AML).

Bio-IT World | Cancer researcher Andy Futreal at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute believes there is plenty of cause for optimism when it comes to sequencing cancer genomes. Speaking at the Frontiers in Cancer Science 2010 meeting in Singapore, Futreal catalogued the cancer advances over the past ten years of genome sequencing, and proposed future directions for the field.

Bio-IT World | DNA Electronics and 454 Life Sciences have entered a partnership to develop a low-cost, high-throughput, long read, high density DNA sequencing system. The technology is expected to build on 454's current pyrosequencing-based platform.

Bio-IT World | Biomatters launched their newest software package yesterday, Geneious Server, to analyze next-generation sequencing data, and it's already found customers in Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta and Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Maryland.

Bio-IT World | If anyone was capable of distilling the lessons learned in the ten years since the first draft of the Human Genome Project in 2000, it was Broad Institute director Eric Lander in the opening address at the annual American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) convention in Washington, D.C.

Bio-IT World | BRISBANE—At TRX10, Translational Research Excellence, held last month in Brisbane, amid a wide-ranging program covering everything from stem cell models to commercializing academic innovations, translational approaches to cancer and central nervous system disease to trial design, discussion turned to repositories for genetic and clinical data. Researchers encouraged one another to share raw data, analyses, and clinical findings to further research and enable advances in medicine.

Xconomy & Wall Street Journal Blog | Last week Pacific Biosciences raised $200 million through its IPO, a number in the middle of its expected range. The IPO was also good news for Complete Genomics, which released an amended IPO prospectus raising its self valuation to $12 to $14/share.

Boston Herald | Novartis is planning to add 300 new jobs and invest $600 million over the next five years to expand its research campus adjacent to the former Necco candy factory in Cambridge, Mass.

Bio-IT World Expert Commentary | An exciting recent advance in medicine has been the generation of induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells which are derived from somatic cells, rather than embryos, through a process of “de-differentiation.” But the advance raises important intellectual property and patent questions.