The Week in Review

By John E. West

February 15, 2008

Here’s a collection of highlights, selected totally subjectively, from this week’s HPC news stream as reported at insideHPC.com and HPCwire.

>>10 words and a link

Cray Q4 losses widen, narrow for year on better margins;
http://insidehpc.com/2008/02/14/cray-reports-q4-results-posts-loss/

Georgia Tech’s shiny new PhD in CS&E;
http://insidehpc.com/2008/02/14/georgia-creates-new-cse-phd-program/

HP’s new double-wide Itanium blade;
http://insidehpc.com/2008/02/12/hp-announces-revved-itanium-blade/

Sun’s Network.com adds 14 new applications;
http://insidehpc.com/2008/02/14/networkcom-adds-apps/

Shanghai Many-Core Workshop March 27-28;
http://insidehpc.com/2008/02/11/shanghai-many-core-workshop/

HP’s new HPC podcast;
http://tinyurl.com/yrshyh

IBM researching new transistors;
http://insidehpc.com/2008/02/13/ibm-wins-contract-to-research-non-thermionic-transistors/

A pair of Cray workshops;
http://insidehpc.com/2008/02/12/cray-technical-workshop/
http://insidehpc.com/2008/02/14/cray-xt4-workshop-for-hector-at-epcc/

>>Lights out at Linux Networx, mail forwarded to SGI

Breaking my long tradition of writing about rumors that don’t work out, SGI announced late Thursday (http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2008/february/momentum.html) that it has acquired the core assets of Linux Networx. The acquisition of patents, LNXI software, expertise and technology came in exchange for the issuance of SGI common stock. Alongside the deal is an investment into SGI by Oak Investment Partners and Lehman Brothers.

“This is another significant step in the growth of SGI,” said Bo Ewald, SGI Chief Executive Officer. “We’ve grown orders more than 30 percent in each of the last two quarters. We’re in a position to acquire key technology and expertise to further power our growth. This represents the first of such key technology acquisitions and will help further the development of our software environment and support for our clustered systems. In addition, we are very pleased that Oak and Lehman Brothers have provided additional financing to the company to help speed our growth.”

Several key patents in the way of cluster design and cooling were acquired. Our thoughts are with the families of Linux Networx employees as they go through this time of extreme duress.

>>Sun reverses its 0 datacenter policy…kind of

Ashlee Vance writes at The Register (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/13/sun_datacenter_2015/) that Sun’s CEO has, er, clarified Brian Cinque’s earlier blog post. Before the clarification, let’s review what Brian actually wrote:

Sun IT is driving towards a consolidated and unified datacenter approach by 2015, while reducing overall operating costs, overall energy consumptions, and to eliminate all SunIT data center’s [sic]. Did I just say 0 data centers? Yes! Our goal is to reduce our entire datacenter presence by 2015.

Fairly clear, though I did point out earlier that I thought the qualifier “SunIT” was important. He didn’t say “no Sun datacenters” as was reported around the interwebs.

Anywho, the correction:

The employee was simply “envisioning a world with no data centers,” according to Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, speaking to reporters here at Sun’s Menlo Park headquarters.

…”We will have data centers at Sun for a long time into the future,” Schwartz said.

Weak. That clearly isn’t what he was doing. I’d rather he said, “Brian smokes crack at work, and we’ve got him in rehab” than try to weasel out of it.

Anyway, if you take my read on it, both statements can be correct at the same time (Schroedinger’s PR), and this actually makes sense from a business perspective for Sun. They eat their own dog food by moving internal data processing over to Network.com, so that SunIT has 0 datacenters, but as a company Sun continues to have massive datacenters.

Everybody’s happy. Except Cinque. I hear rehab can be rough.

—–

John West is part of the team that summarizes the headlines in HPC news every day at insideHPC.com. You can contact him at [email protected]. Too busy to keep up? Make your commute productive and listen to the Weekly Takeout, insideHPC.com’s weekly audio news summary of the HPC news week in review.

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