Joe Landman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> I think you're looking through the lens of your customer base. A large > > Quite possibly. > >> number of clusters never run commercial codes, and some commercial > > True. They tend to be low margin commodity clusters that are very > hard to support "value added" companies atop though.
That depends. SiCortex claims that they're an overall win for their customers. Perhaps this is true, perhaps not, but one can certainly see how people who need extremely large clusters might care a lot. >> codes come with source. So the addressable market is still pretty big. > > Well... the TAM is "large" in some sense, but the margins in the > academic/research market are nothing to write home about. It is hard > to build a (venture backed) company servicing those markets. There are a lot of venture backed companies in computational chemistry that seem to make all their money on academic and research -- indeed, I don't know of any market for computational chemistry software outside of academia and research (though of course some of that research is paid for by pharma companies). Going outside of computers, there are plenty of companies that make their money selling biotechnology equipment and specialty chemicals that are primarily of interest in academia and in research -- arrays to measure gene expression levels, for example, but there is a very broad market. None of this should be surprising -- there is a lot of money spent on academic and commercial research in the world. Perry -- Perry E. Metzger [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
