April 21, 2018
Addison Snell
As published in HPCWire A long-standing concern in HPC is the graying of the industry. That is, new people are not coming in at the skilled positions as older ones retire. (In the sports world this is how championship teams become also-rans in the matter of a few years). Although this issue has been noted…
April 21, 2018
Addison Snell
Models of Economic Success: Can HPC Help Turn Things Around? Global economic turmoil affects us at both organizational and individual levels. As companies cut staff to reduce expenses, investors anxiously review their portfolios. If we lose our jobs, we want savings to fall back on. Let’s face it: a lot of us are in a…
April 21, 2018
Addison Snell
As published in HPCWire Do you know what the saddest part is of Rackable’s attempt to acquire SGI’s assets out of bankruptcy for a paltry $25 million in cash? There would be very little effect on the HPC market as a result. Thanks to a cascading series of problems — bad marketing, operational misfires, bad…
April 21, 2018
Christopher G. Willard Ph.D.
As published in HPCWire With Oracle’s acquisition of Sun for $5.6 billion (net), the company is acquiring, among other assets, an estimated 8.4 percent stake ($627 million) in the traditional HPC server market. The question arises: is this an asset that Oracle will keep/nurture as it moves to integrate Sun into its ongoing product and…
April 21, 2018
Addison Snell
You’ve Got the Brawn; I’ve Got the Brains Intel and Cray have announced a partnership to begin collaboration on the design of a new supercomputer, which could be available in approximately three years. Under the partnership agreement, engineers from each company will work together directly, with the goal of generating a scalable architecture that will…
April 21, 2018
Addison Snell
Acquisitions of SGI, Sun Heading in Opposite Directions for HPC as published in HPCWire Sun and SGI have followed similar trajectories throughout much of their linked histories — parallel parabolas that blazed through several common markets, including technical workstations and HPC, from their explosive Silicon Valley launches in the early 1980s to their financial zeniths…
April 21, 2018
Christopher G. Willard Ph.D.
Musings on Economic Storms and Industry Consolidation as published in HPCWire “Bad economic times lead to industry consolidation/shake-out.” That is one economic rule that actually makes intuitive sense, like small craft are the first to sink in a hurricane, or the speed of light is the same to all observers (OK I admit I’m still…
April 21, 2018
Addison Snell
Oh, Yeah – The Workstation Is Sexy Again (Just Please Don’t Call It a Personal Supercomputer) as published in HPCWire For over 10 years, from the late 1980s throughout the 1990s, technical workstations were the stunningly sexy starlets of the computing world. Advancements in graphics cards and RISC microprocessors gave engineers and scientists unprecedented performance…
April 21, 2018
Addison Snell, Laura Segervall
As published in HPCWire This article is excerpted from “Cloud Opportunities in HPC: Market Taxonomy,” published by InterSect360 Research. The full article was distributed to subscribers of the InterSect360 market advisory service and can also be obtained by contacting sales@intersect360.com. In Life, the Universe, and Everything, the third book of Douglas Adams’ whimsical Hitchhiker fantasy…
April 21, 2018
Addison Snell
HPC Application Software Vendors Begin to Adapt to the Demands of Utility, SaaS, and Cloud Computing as published in HPCWire At a casual glance it seems the entire High Performance Computing industry is going gung ho on clouds. HPC system vendors are launching cloud-enabled infrastructure services. Middleware providers offer solutions for migrating applications to public,…