I spent a summer working at IBM (porting applications) when LLNL's Blue Gene system was being installed/finalized. After spending 10 years in college/grad school with no real outside experience, it was an interesting time. A few observations might be relevant to the discussion.
(1) to a certain extent, intellectual/scientific prestige was very important to the culture of the place. Promotions were/are based in part on how many patents you generate (not dissimilar to a publications count), but at least superficially, patents don't seem like a major revenue stream. Another data point, the company has a few internal research journals, http://domino.research.ibm.com/tchjr/journalindex.nsf/Home?OpenForm . (2) about once a week, my supervisor (a very skilled applications programmer) would ask, "So, have you figured out how to sell a million Blue Gene's yet?". Once the design was finalized/produced, the clear goal was to sell lots of them. (Fastest/best/national lab etc only really matter for a short time - people have to be paid...). (3) The local view seemed to be that the interconnect fabric (really fast and high-bandwith, ideal for finite-element calculations, and actually somewhat difficult to implement (well) in Molecular Dynamics) in the BGL was included because of LLNL's application needs, and the machine was accordingly hard to sell to "regular customers." (Something akin to selling a fleet of porsche's to a Taxi Company). (3.5) a little more. 0.8GHz cpus, minimum allocation is 512/1024 CPU's at a time. Not really an architecture that the guys at Citibank are used to writing for... As I recall, this was a result of the design requirements from LLNL. Its an amazing system to look at though - its just one big board with a bunch of chips (CPU+memory) plugged in. The system density and low power consumption was the most impressive thing to me. (4) From my experience, it seems like one of the roots of IBM's success was taking a computer that you have to replace every two years (or can build from parts on NewEgg) and turning it into an industrial appliance (like a hobart mixer or a drill-press) that you service regularly and can get 10 or more years of life out of. This seemed like the essence of the "i-Series, and earlier "System-360" machines. _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
