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<p>Hallo Kilian,</p>
<p><br></p>
<p>Donnerstag, 2. April 2009, meintest Du:</p>
<p><br></p>
<p><span class=rvts6>KC> On Wednesday 01 April 2009 16:19:57 John Hearns wrote:</span></p>
<p><span class=rvts7>>> > There are a few services/integration HPC</span></p>
<p><span class=rvts7>>> > companies in the EU, but not any that I'm aware of selling their own</span></p>
<p><span class=rvts7>>> > hardware, as Scalable or Penguin do.</span></p>
<p><br></p>
<p><span class=rvts7>>> ????? I know that both Streamline and Clustervision will do you a</span></p>
<p><span class=rvts7>>> Supermicro build.</span></p>
<p><span class=rvts7>>> I think you are talking to the wrong people to be honest!</span></p>
<p><br></p>
<p><span class=rvts7>>> I put in a very nice machine for QMU in London with Supermicro twins</span></p>
<p><span class=rvts7>>> and Infiniband.</span></p>
<p><br></p>
<p><span class=rvts6>KC> My bad here for not being explicit enough. By "their own hardware", I meant</span></p>
<p><span class=rvts6>KC> "hardware they put a lot of thought in, that they carefully conceived and</span></p>
<p><span class=rvts6>KC> designed, and have manufactured according to their own needs and guidelines",</span></p>
<p><br></p>
<p>Let me ask: why is that important?</p>
<p><br></p>
<p>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? </p>
<p><br></p>
<p><span class=rvts6>KC> not "Supermicro boxes". Not that Supermicro boxes are low grade or not a good</span></p>
<p><span class=rvts6>KC> fit for the job, just that they generally are multi-purpose components, not</span></p>
<p><span class=rvts6>KC> necessarily designed with HPC as a first concern. And Supermicro is not quite</span></p>
<p><span class=rvts6>KC> a small company either.</span></p>
<p><br></p>
<p>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...</p>
<p><br></p>
<p>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. </p>
<p><br></p>
<p><span class=rvts6>KC> Anyway, I was thinking about companies like Penguin or Scalable, designing</span></p>
<p><span class=rvts6>KC> their own hardware products, like Relions or JackRabbits, and not just</span></p>
<p><span class=rvts6>KC> reselling Supermicro boxes. Unless I'm mistaken on the fact that those systems</span></p>
<p><span class=rvts6>KC> are somewhat different from off-the-shelf boxes. </span></p>
<p><br></p>
<p>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. </p>
<p><br></p>
<p>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. </p>
<p><br></p>
<p><span class=rvts6>KC> I don't know about Streamline, but AFAIK, Clustervision "just" resells big</span></p>
<p><span class=rvts6>KC> names hardware, they don't make their own. </span></p>
<p><span class=rvts6><br></span></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><br></p>
<p><br></p>
<p><br></p>
<p><span class=rvts6>KC> It's not a bad thing per se, just a</span></p>
<p><span class=rvts6>KC> way to point out the fact that HPC-wise, the market is pretty different here</span></p>
<p><span class=rvts6>KC> and there, and that purchasing options seem sparser to me in the EU compared</span></p>
<p><span class=rvts6>KC> to the US.</span></p>
<p><br></p>
<p>I don't think it is that different.</p>
<p>
<br>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?</p>
<p><br></p>
<p><span class=rvts6>KC> So, to get back to the original discussion, SGI disappearing from the </span></p>
<p><span class=rvts6>KC> landscape means one less option to choose from. Considering the fact that</span></p>
<p><span class=rvts6>KC> those options are already kind of fewer than in the US, the relative loss is</span></p>
<p><span class=rvts6>KC> more perceptible.</span></p>
<p><br></p>
<p>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 ;-)</p>
<p><br></p>
<p>Jan </p>
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