Hallo Kilian, Donnerstag, 2. April 2009, meintest Du:
KC> On Wednesday 01 April 2009 16:19:57 John Hearns wrote: >> > There are a few services/integration HPC >> > companies in the EU, but not any that I'm aware of selling their own >> > hardware, as Scalable or Penguin do. >> ????? I know that both Streamline and Clustervision will do you a >> Supermicro build. >> I think you are talking to the wrong people to be honest! >> I put in a very nice machine for QMU in London with Supermicro twins >> and Infiniband. KC> My bad here for not being explicit enough. By "their own hardware", I meant KC> "hardware they put a lot of thought in, that they carefully conceived and KC> designed, and have manufactured according to their own needs and guidelines", Let me ask: why is that important? What is driving HPC is the commodity approach. Use what is used a million-times all over the world. Where is the need to engineer something different? KC> not "Supermicro boxes". Not that Supermicro boxes are low grade or not a good KC> fit for the job, just that they generally are multi-purpose components, not KC> necessarily designed with HPC as a first concern. And Supermicro is not quite KC> a small company either. If you look at the Supermicro Twin for example: that System is designed for HPC. I can't think of many ways to make it better... And if a small company does something new you won't sell a huge quantity. So the components get (usually) more expensive. The engineering isn't quite as advanced (because it is expensive) and many errors just show when you have a larger install-base. KC> Anyway, I was thinking about companies like Penguin or Scalable, designing KC> their own hardware products, like Relions or JackRabbits, and not just KC> reselling Supermicro boxes. Unless I'm mistaken on the fact that those systems KC> are somewhat different from off-the-shelf boxes. Mhh... a Relion server does not look very different from Intel-Servers (i mean the intel-oem products). A Jackrabbit seems to be a standard Chenbro/ICP/Whatever chassis with commodity Boards/Controllers/Disks. The real trick is probably the software. So don't get me wrong: don't want to mock their products. And it seems that some customers really like the idea of companies having "own products". I worked for a company with a own product line before - but behind that there was Supermicro/Intel/MSI... you name it. Customer didn't had real advantage... was just a marketing thing. KC> I don't know about Streamline, but AFAIK, Clustervision "just" resells big KC> names hardware, they don't make their own. That is true (for ClusterVision). We (i'm with ClusterVision) are investing in our Software - because there we see a lot of potential to do better than what you see on the market. Hardware is not that different - except for the brand-name. KC> It's not a bad thing per se, just a KC> way to point out the fact that HPC-wise, the market is pretty different here KC> and there, and that purchasing options seem sparser to me in the EU compared KC> to the US. I don't think it is that different. Even a company like SGI doesn't seem big enough to really have own hardware (and live with what you earn for it on the market). And even if ICE is a nice system - it is not that much different from what other BladeSystems are doing. So why should a customer bother? KC> So, to get back to the original discussion, SGI disappearing from the KC> landscape means one less option to choose from. Considering the fact that KC> those options are already kind of fewer than in the US, the relative loss is KC> more perceptible. Maybe i'm too young to really see SGI going down as a big loss - in my time they were just another Intel-Selling company with a strange attitude and really expensive products. But i never understood the excitement about Sun either ;-) Jan
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