According to Wired Science, the U.S. Department of Energy is about to give scientist more time for open research on two of its largest supercomputers. Scientists will have an additional 1.3 billion hours of processor hours available for complex simulations and computations. One of these supercomputers is the Cray XT Jaguar, located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

The Jaguar was named the world’s fasted supercomputer for unclassified use in late 2008. Under the hood it has 45,000 quad-core AMD Opteron processors and 362 tetrabytes of memory, and is capable of processing 1.64 petaflops, which translates to 1.64 quadrillion mathematical calculations per second. The Jaguar’s price tag is about $100 million.

You can see a cool time-lapse video of the Jaguar computer being built here.

Android is Google’s mobile operating system, currently restricted to cell phones. That may not be the case for long. Several consumer electronics companies would like to use the Android OS for other gadgets, including e-book readers, digital photo frames and netbooks. There are even some working prototypes being shown by manufacturers such as Fujitsu.

There is pressure on consumer electronics companies to market devices with more functionality at a lower price. An open source OS that runs on multiple platforms will facilitate development of such devices. Android, which is based on the Linux kernel, is an open source OS with the backing of Google. It remains to be seen if Microsoft can come up with something or if Android will satisfy this new demand.

For the family that has everything, the next great gadget gift may be the Chumby. This little ‘beanbag’ computer plays custom feeds of Internet websites, including sports news, weather, stock updates or any kind of news.

The Chumby is a quick way to get in touch on Facebook or Twitter without turning on a computer. You can also stream video from sites like YouTube. It has a 3.5 inch screen and a built in stereo radio. Basic models start at $199. Found out more on the Chumby website.