Standing out at a Career Faire can make a difference in your job hunt. Career Faires are starting to pick up, and a major job search company is running some nice ones, called Targeted Job Fairs. At a Silicon Valley Job Faire in January, 10 companies as showing up, and Dice has 82 career faires scheduled for 2010 across the States.

How do you compete at a Job Fair? The competition can be noteworthy, but you can help yourself jump out from the bunch with advance homework. At AA-Careers, we have a simple step-by-step process to prepare. Planning to go? Here’s how to prepare:

First, investigate the companies that are going and pick your targets. Use the web to check out the organizations that are there beforehand. Go to their internet sites and see if they have their job openings listed. Pick a sensible number to go after, and get ready to spend about an hour researching each one. It’s hard to do more than 9 in a day, and three or four is a much more reasonable target. For each hiring company, you want to know: recent news, key product lines, and contacts you know. Try to see if you know anyone at the target companies. You should end up with a page or two of research for each company/job.

Second, if there are job openings on the web, read them to see what the hiring manager is looking for. Create a mapping of your achievements and skills to the demands of the job. Make the terminology match. If the hiring organization calls customers "clients", your resume should do the same thing. The achievements should be written in the style of the hiring company.

Third, create a ‘mini sales pitch’ for each likely company/position combination. Write down a 60 second ‘thumbnail’ that you can repeat out loud showing why you are a special candidate for that job. You’ll use this in your resume and when you meet the company at the job kiosk.

Fourth, modify your resume for each opportunity. The objective on your resume should exactly match the job you’re want. The executive summary should be a written form of your “mini sales pitch” for the job. Then choose the accomplishments and skills that most clearly match the job prerequisites. Especially at a Career Fair, the purpose of your resume is a sales tool for you – to get you on-site job interviews. It should be obvious to see that you’re a match based on your resume.

Fifth, practice your ‘mini-sales-pitch’. Collect your research and the resume for each spot - bring a couple of copies for each – and put each in a understandably marked folder. Keep them in a lightweight briefcase or folio.

Finally, dress and prepare as if you’re doing on-site interviews. Dress well and be fittingly groomed. Avoid strong cologne or perfume…use any eau de cologne or perfume meagerly, if at all.

Remember to smile, and good hunting!

According to the Top 500 list of supercomputers that was published by industry researchers, the Jaguar supercomputer by Cray is the fastest in the planet. This is the first time that Jaguar actually beat IBM’s Roadrunner in terms of performance, achieving about 2 million billion calculations per second. But a deeper look at the said list suggests that the trend in supercomputing shows not only of faster machines but a constant erosion of how the industry has been performing. The industry has seen how dedicated vendors like SiCortex and venerable players such as SGI either being shut down or getting acquired after filing for bankruptcy.Interestingly, many of the components of supercomputers - from the processors to the networking cables used - are actually the same as those that are used for everyday corporate computing and hosting services. The number of processors that are used to build supercomputers is constantly decreasing. As high-performance computers and supercomputers continue to use mainstream components, it becomes more difficult to identify the high-performance varieties from those used for corporate computing. Rackable which acquired SGI, builds products with the corporate consumer in mind. As the hardware for high-performance computers becomes more like the one used in corporate data centers, other technology providers such as Microsoft are tapping into the familiar architecture to address the demands.And because supercomputers are also becoming… well, less super, their accessibility has also increased. Microsoft, Rackable, Intel and other firms are already out to take advantage of the trends. But as the industry continues to come out with machines that are capable of exascale performance, it’s unclear if these products and other common architectures can even linearly scale out without using up a lot of space and energy.