[Beowulf] SiCortex experience anyone?

[Jim Lux]

Quoting "Lombard, David N" <dnlombar at ichips.intel.com>, on Tue 27 May  
2008 05:02:30 PM PDT:



>>
>> 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.
>
> To put a finer point on this, ISVs ask: How do I get incremental revenue
> from this?  Clearly such incremental revenue must be a sufficiently healthy
> multiple of their costs.
>
Just so...

The value of a supercomputer under the desk is primarily to the end  
user (faster whatever to free up an expensive engineer's time). They  
don't see much difference between buying the software for a single  
processor or multiprocessor.  The ISV won't get many incremental sales  
from having a fast box to run it on, because the customer would  
probably buy it in any case.  The end user isn't interested in paying  
the ISV to port it to the "supercomputer in a box" at least not on any  
scale comparable to the actual cost of doing the port (i.e. they'd  
probably be willing to spend <2x for the ported version, but they're  
also already forking out the bucks for the box, too.. They tend to  
view that as the extent of what they're willing to invest.

Jim