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Linux Chosen for IBM's New Supercomputer
Uhh_Duh writes "news.com is reporting that Linux will be the main OS in the Blue Gene - IBM's $100m supercomputer project. The Blue Gene will contain 65,000 processors and 16 trillion bytes of memory." Wow. That's a lot of nuclear weapons simulations.
That's a lot of nuclear weapons simulations.
RTFA. That's a lot of protein fold simulations.
Second, the AIX roadmap goes out to at least 2007 (five year planning window). So don't be throwing away your SMIT knowledge quite yet. I'd be very surprised if there wasn't significant AIX work being done as far out as 2010.
IBM has at least us$20B in AIX and as a result it is very mature. They're putting nearly us$1B a year into Linux (JFS being just one wonderful thing ported). It will still be a while before they can bet the company on Linux. Do also keep in mind that AIX has at least a 15 year head start on Linux.
-- Multics
Porting or developing their own projects -- JFS is an often pointed to as an example
Sponsoring developers of Open Source projects -- I know at least one KDE developer that was paid to write a series of tutorials on KParts that were published on IBM's web site . I recently saw something by the founder of Gentoo Linux as well.
Public Relations -- This is the big one. IBM lends Open Source and Linux more credability than any other company. They throw more resources into promoting Linu x than any other company. At a time where most major tech companies are at the most passively supporting Linux, IBM is very actively promoting it, and it's the reason that a lot of other major players are paying attention to Linux
Again, you can't underestimate the effects that having IBM backing Linux has in a corporate environment. Intel and AMD are paying attention because of IBM, and I'd be that a lot of a big part of why MS has taken note of Linux lately is that competing with Linux means competing with IBM.
So yes, they're contributing back, but the most significant ways are not the conventional methods. They're in fact contributing something to Linux that no number of hackers can -- credibility.
Linux is free. Linux will remain free. Forever.
And "free" as in "freedom" is important. It guarantees a save investment and makes sure you are not trapped in vendor lock-in. It also guarantees the abcense of stuff like WPA or MSFT's new EULA.
Stuff like that is more important than what "sucks" and what has "media appeal". IBM has learned this first-hand with OS/2.
No, OS/2 did not fail because of crappy marketing. It failed because computer-makers refused to preinstall a OS from a competitor. No matter how cheap it might have been, no matter how great it was. - It would have been a stupid decision for computer makers to chain themselves to a competitor.
While some people still don't get it, EVERY major IT-company already understood that Linux is the only way to go long-term. Every major IT-company which is not trapped in Microsoft-contracts is supporting, using and/or offering Linux solutions. IBM, Intel, AMD, Sun, Oracle.. you name it.
What????
IBM have spent a fortune on raising the public profile of linux. Now, perhaps you're a software geek, but those positive articles about linux in the mainstream press don't come cheap. And those IBM Consultants selling linux to conservative financial data centres need a LOT of backing.
IBM are fighting a propaganda war with Microsoft. That eats millions very fast.
Programmers on this level face entirely different challenges, such as optimizing a 65 thousand thread program so that CPUs aren't idle 90% of the time waiting for others. This is going to output some high quality specialized kernel code that about 10 or 20 computers around the world would find helpful performance-wise. Any desktop or server for mere mortals won't see much improvement.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.