[Beowulf] SiCortex experience anyone?

[Joe Landman]

Greg Lindahl wrote:
> On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 04:12:35PM -0400, Joe Landman wrote:
> 
>> For them to be successful, they need customers to buy machines, which 
>> usually means getting commercial codes onto them.
> 
> 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.

> 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.

> 
>> Orion never really hit the critical mass it needed to convince major 
>> ISVs to buy into it
> 
> Orion had poor price/performance. ISVs were a symptom, not a cause.

I agree they had poor price performance.  ISVs always (have to) ask the 
question: "how will this help me increase my revenue".  If the vendor 
can't answer that, or doesn't have a good answer for this ("our hardware 
is cool/purple" is not an answer) expect to be met with skepticism about 
prospects.

I wasn't implying that ISVs were the cause of their demise.  I was 
implying that they couldn't build a convincing case for them to get on 
board.

> 
> -- greg
> 
> 
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-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
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Scalable Informatics LLC,
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