From the Editor | Main Blog Index
September 04, 2008
It's easy to tell we're in post-Labor Day mode in high performance computing. There has already been a flood of vendor announcements in the first few days of September, with many more to follow, I'm sure, in the weeks ahead as we head toward the SC08 hullabaloo. It's always fun to see the new HPC offerings and what the marketing departments have come up with for the product names.
Actually, I have a few pet peeves about naming conventions for products, companies and technologies. It often amazes me what people consider to be compelling brand names for these things. So as a community service, I'll offer some guidelines on tech naming conventions that I think are worthwhile. (Hey, no need to thank me.) To be honest, the list of suggestions are more like things to avoid. Here are my top five:
Don't make the brand name harder to spell than the name of your company's CEO.
This is a problem because most humans are generally poor spellers and the nature of the Internet means that difficult brand names are bound to mangled as more and more people write about the product or company. The now defunct Linux Networx tried to get a little too cute with their company name. Toward the end they reverted to LNXI, a pseudo-acronym, but at least easier to remember.
Use uppercase and lowercase letters in a sensible way.
You know who I'm talking about, eXludus. For this, I blame C and Java, two languages that popularized case sensitivity in variables. OK in programming, not so much in branding. Also, initial caps are mandatory. mental images is a great organization that has developed a cool rending app called (sigh) mental ray. But if you're not familiar with the company's aversion to capitalization, those names get lost in the marketing brochure.
Don't call something X-anything.
Names like Xfactor or Xtreme sound trendy. But c'mon, it's not the 1970s and you're not selling comic books to teenagers. Along those lines, I'd stay away from all prefixes that lean toward hyperbole: Super, Ultra, Hyper, ... you get the idea.
Don't choose a company name that sounds like a rock band.
OK, that's actually hard to avoid. Maybe the better advice here is to encourage rock bands not to come up with names that sound like tech companies. Metallica would have been a great brand for hardware firm. Silentium, a company that makes noise reduction products for computers, also happens to be the name as a Finnish Gothic metal band. Hmm.. I wonder if Silentium's noise reduction technology could be applied to Gothic metal music.
Beware of tying your brand to trendy technology jargon.
This is probably hard for the marketing weenies to resist, since getting a brand positioned as a technology leader is always foremost in their minds. But the folks that used "Grid" to name their product have probably lived to regret it. In ten years, I'm betting words like "Cloud," "Virtualization," and "SOA" will also have moved on.
To me this all seems like marketing 101, but I'm continually surprised by how many firms (even large ones that can afford marketing departments) descend into strangeness when it comes to brand names.
So what's a good name? One that is simple to say, spell, and remember, but is also unique and clever. Ideally, you don't need to resort to an acronym to shorten it. One of the best examples for a company name is Appistry, a software maker for application fabrics. The best OS name: probably Linux. And the best product name ... drum roll please: Opteron.
Posted by Michael Feldman - September 03, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
![]()
Michael Feldman is the editor of HPCwire.
No Recent Blog Comments
Contributing commentator, Andrew Jones, offers a break in the news cycle with an assessment of what the national "size matters" contest means for the U.S. and other nations...
Read more...
Today at the International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzing, Germany, Jack Dongarra presented on a proposed benchmark that could carry a bit more weight than its older Linpack companion. The high performance conjugate gradient (HPCG) concept takes into account new architectures for new applications, while shedding the floating point....
Read more...
Not content to let the Tianhe-2 announcement ride alone, Intel rolled out a series of announcements around its Knights Corner and Xeon Phi products--all of which are aimed at adding some options and variety for a wider base of potential users across the HPC spectrum. Today at the International Supercomputing Conference, the company's Raj....
Read more...
Jun 19, 2013 |
Supercomputer architectures have evolved considerably over the last 20 years, particularly in the number of processors that are linked together. One aspect of HPC architecture that hasn't changed is the MPI programming model.
Read more...
Jun 18, 2013 |
The world's largest supercomputers, like Tianhe-2, are great at traditional, compute-intensive HPC workloads, such as simulating atomic decay or modeling tornados. But data-intensive applications--such as mining big data sets for connections--is a different sort of workload, and runs best on a different sort of computer.
Read more...
Jun 18, 2013 |
Researchers are finding innovative uses for Gordon, the 285 teraflop supercomputer housed at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) that has a unique Flash-based storage system. Since going online, researchers have put the incredibly fast I/O to use on a wide variety of workloads, ranging from chemistry to political science.
Read more...
Jun 17, 2013 |
The advent of low-power mobile processors and cloud delivery models is changing the economics of computing. But just as an economy car is good at different things than a full size truck, an HPC workload still has certain computing demands that neither the fastest smartphone nor the most elastic cloud cluster can fulfill.
Read more...
Jun 14, 2013 |
For all the progress we've made in IT over the last 50 years, there's one area of life that has steadfastly eluded the grasp of computers: understanding human language. Now, researchers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) are utilizing a Hadoop cluster on its Longhorn supercomputer to move the state of the art of language processing a little bit further.
Read more...
05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.
04/15/2013 | Bull | “50% of HPC users say their largest jobs scale to 120 cores or less.” How about yours? Are your codes ready to take advantage of today’s and tomorrow’s ultra-parallel HPC systems? Download this White Paper by Analysts Intersect360 Research to see what Bull and Intel’s Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming can do for your codes.
Join HPCwire Editor Nicole Hemsoth and Dr. David Bader from Georgia Tech as they take center stage on opening night at Atlanta's first Big Data Kick Off Week, filmed in front of a live audience. Nicole and David look at the evolution of HPC, today's big data challenges, discuss real world solutions, and reveal their predictions. Exactly what does the future holds for HPC?
Join our webinar to learn how IT managers can migrate to a more resilient, flexible and scalable solution that grows with the data center. Mellanox VMS is future-proof, efficient and brings significant CAPEX and OPEX savings. The VMS is available today.