Dresden

Dresden is one of the great success stories of German reunification. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the capital of the East German state of Saxony remade itself as the center of European semiconductor production, becoming home to major facilities operated by U.S. chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices as well as Munich-based Infineon Technologies. When a 1998 Time magazine article dubbed the region "Silicon Saxony," locals embraced the label and even founded an organization by that name to promote industry interests.

Advanced Micro Devices, which has been struggling to regain its footing in competition with rival Intel, announced Tuesday that it will split into two companies. One of the companies will be a global enterprise focused on semiconductor manufacturing, temporarily called The Foundry Company. AMD itself will focus on designing microprocessors.

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Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Machine Tools and Forming Technology IWU in Dresden have figured out a way to quiet down the whiney whirring of wind turbines by neutralizing vibrations coming from the central tower of the turbine. They’ve come up with a device that can be mounted to an existing turbine, which senses the vibrations and produces an “anti-sound” vibration, effectively pressing against the sound vibration to cancel it out.

On Wednesday, IBM made history with the hybrid supercomputer it built for the National Nuclear Security Administration's Los Alamos National Lab. The Roadrunner burned its way into the Top500 supercomputer record book as the most powerful system in the world -- by a wide margin.

Roadrunner's sustained performance of 1.02 petaFLOPS (1.02 quadrillion calculations per second) puts the system in a class of its own -- more than three times faster than the nearest non-IBM system.