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just beowulf 100 PS3s together, that should be able to pull it off

Humor aside, I'm afraid some jackass would actually try this. First off, the PS3 doesn't support high-speed networks such as Myrinet or InfiniBand. And secondly, Sony is unlikely to ever provide support for any institution that uses a video game console in this manner, unlike IBM or Cray. I have a blog post specifically about this.

I think Microsoft's reason for pushing into HPC is to provide better software development tools for clusters. Can you imagine being able to program in VB.net instead of C99? After all, physicists are there to do science, not write code. Plus, MATLAB (Distributed Computing Toolbox) and Mathematica (gridMathematica) will both be available for Windows CCS, and I imagine Star-P may be out before too long. All in all, I'm cautiously optimistic about getting better development environments available for supercomputing. Of course there is still the concern about license costs and the resource-hogging GUI.

I blogged about these topics a while back, both MS in HPC and better programming tools for supercomputing:

http://hpcanswers.com/plog/index.php?op=ViewArticl e&articleId=27&blogId=1
http://hpcanswers.com/plog/index.php?op=ViewArticl e&articleId=25&blogId=1

I think Microsoft's reason for pushing into HPC is to provide better software development tools for clusters. Can you imagine being able to program in VB.net instead of C99? After all, physicists are there to do science, not write code. Plus, MATLAB (Distributed Computing Toolbox) and Mathematica (gridMathematica) will both be available for Windows CCS, and I imagine Star-P may be out before too long. All in all, I'm cautiously optimistic about getting better development environments available for supercomputing. Of course there is still the concern about license costs and the resource-hogging GUI.

I blogged about these topics a while back, both MS in HPC and better programming tools for supercomputing:

http://hpcanswers.com/plog/index.php?op=ViewArticl e&articleId=27&blogId=1
http://hpcanswers.com/plog/index.php?op=ViewArticl e&articleId=25&blogId=1

I was at LinuxWorld, Sydney, last week. I met a rep from JBoss who immediately started asking me to code for his product. I kept explaining to him that I don't know the first thing about application servers. Didn't matter; he still kept pressuring me to write for him. Essentially, he wanted me to code for free while JBoss makes money. Yeah, I'll get right on that.

IBM was pushing computing-as-a-utility a few years ago. Their premise was that just as customers don't have their own power generators—they just buy electricity at market rates exactly as required—folks should be able to acquire computing time only as needed and let a company of professionals deal with all the maintenance issues. But no one bought into on-demand computing and IBM has since backed away from this position.

The reason this flopped for IBM was that everyone compared it to the "good old days" of dealing with shared computing facilities and batch loaders. It's the same reason people buy small clusters instead of paying for space with a national lab. The comparison to punch cards is apt, as are the discussions of "what if I spend all this time and money only to discover that I bug?"

I don't see how Sun is going to succeed in the market. Smaller customers will probably be better off buying a "personal supercomputer" rather than rent time. As for the really large customers, they will be running jobs 24/7 for years on lots of processors; it may in fact be cheaper for them to buy a BlueGene than rent time from Sun.