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The question among both cloud computing consumers and supercomputer clients alike has been when the distinction between the little cloud and the big iron would disappear. Apparently that boundary evaporated several months ago. In its twice-annual survey of big computer power, the University of Mannheim has reported that Amazon's EC2 Compute Cluster - the same one you and I can rent space and time on today - performs well enough to be ranked #42 among the world's Top 500 supercomputers.

How far down is #42? In terms of time, not far at all. When EC2 was but a gleam in Jeff Bezos' eye, Los Alamos National Laboratory's BlueGene/L was king. Now, the 212,992-core beast ranks #22. Roadrunner, the amazing hybrid made up of 122,400 of both IBM Power and AMD Opteron cores, sits in #11. Meanwhile, EC2 - whose makeup is a little of this and a little of that - has achieved #42 status with only 17,024 cores.

The Nikkei Daily in Japan is reporting that Fujitsu will invest $537 million in cloud computing for 2011.

That seems like a staggering investment to us but perhaps it's not at all surprising considering the metamorphosis in the IT sector.

According to The Nikkei and Reuters, the investments will be for more servers and external memory storage at data centers in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, Australia and Singapore.

Fujitsu has integrated MindTouch technology into its scanner technology. The service means that people can feed documents through a Fujitsu scanner and then automatically post them to the MindTouch cloud-based collaboration service. Documents will be uploaded, stored, shared and processed into a web-oriented environment.

It's the cloud factor that makes this interesting. Scanning documents into a cloud-based environment has a number of implications for markets that still rely on antiquated storage practices. For example, this is the kind of application that would seem to be applicable for law firms that now use warehouses to store millions of paper documents.

Fujitsu has announced the newest version of its FlexFrame for Oracle, and it now supports the Oracle VM, the server virtualization software.

By integrating with Oracle VM, FlexFrame can now handle a more dynamic enterprise infrastructure. A centralized storage system may not be as new and exciting as the cloud, but this new partnership will make a difference to large-scale IT.

Lost and stolen company laptops have brought much angst to many a CEO over the years but that could all change with new technology from Fujitsu that enables data on a notebook PCs hard drive to be rendered useless remotely.

The solution, built by Fujitsu and wireless provider Willcom is based on a communications module that is built into laptop PCs, and enables owners to not only completely lock down the data, but also to issue and execute the command even when the PC is turned off, or the battery has been depleted.