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NCSA and IBM Part Ways Over Blue Waters
An anonymous reader writes "IBM has terminated its contract with NCSA for the petascale Blue Waters system that was expected to go online in the next year. The reason stated was that NCSA found IBM's technology 'was more complex and required significantly increased financial and technical support by IBM beyond its original expectations.' The IT community is now wondering if NCSA will be renting out space in the new data center that is being built to house Blue Waters or if they will go with another vendor."
The reason stated was that NCSA found IBM's technology 'was more complex and required significantly increased financial and technical support by IBM beyond its original expectations.'
Translation: NCSA found that IBM was trying to lock them in with ultra proprietary technology that would have required IBM's expensive services for the life of the installation.
Pretty surprising development, given the length of time that IBM and NCSA had been working on this. Dropping a contract like this essentially puts into question IBM's costing on future contract bids, so it's not something that they'd do lightly. It'll be interesting to see the scuttlebutt that comes out afterward to see how much of this was technical shortcomings and how much pure financial considerations from IBM. Maybe since IBM already got their big publicity for Power7 from Watson, they're being more profit-concious on future Power systems so they don't tie themselves to margins that are too low.
From the NCSA side, there will certainly be a fallback of some sort - NSF and NCSA are already working out those details according to recent reports. I'd guess that they go with a large Cray XE6 system, given that a pretty sizeable version of that system is already being stood up and ironed out (the Sandia/Los Alamos Cielo system), and Cray has a lot of history successfully standing up big systems (e.g. ORNL Jaguar, Sandia Red Storm, etc.). SGI Altix is the other alternative, I guess, and there's a pretty big one up at NASA now, though that'd probably be a riskier proposition than Cray IMO, and I expect that NCSA and NSF are going to be pretty risk averse on following up on this.
I've Been Mugged
Good for NCSA! I just wish that the NNSA had the guts to do the same with the Blue Gene/Q.
As in I could do what they do with a few lines of PERL and a Beowulf Cluster!!
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
How many gigabytes long would each line of perl be?
'was more complex and required significantly increased financial and technical support by IBM beyond its original expectations.'
Sounds about normal for an IBM gig then...
Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script!
I think: 0.0000001GB would do it.
Now I know why they canceled the job exams (C, Perl and Linux Admin) I was about to do this week for a position at IBM-LTC. =(
I hope we'll have a thread here rehashing how the Mosaic browser was developed at NCSA in the early '90s by a group of grad students informally lead by Marc Andreesen, and how the university sued after Andreesen and most of the original team took off for Silicon Valley to form Netscape.
It took a custom CPU to knock out the Tianhe (GPU-based) supercomputer. Did IBM plan to use an existing POWER chip, or were they trying to develop a new Cell-like (or other boutique) processor? IBM keeps saying that the future of Cell isn't dead. I wonder if NCSA thought they'd get more bang for their buck with a GPU-based solution?
My experience with IBM is that every new software or equipment setup is painful, complicated and goes over-budget, but once things are up and running, it is rock-solid, so in the long run it is still the vendor I would trust the most for enterprise projects. Knowing them, I always take into account the extra oil and time that will be needed to make things go smoothly at first.
This is very different from a vendor like Dell, who takes good care of its new customers (especially the ones with deep pockets) and make sure that the delivery is on time and budget, but after a while problems start to appear (wrong firmware, obsolete drivers, etc) and pretty soon they tend to ignore you if they feel you won't bring new business in the next quarter.
In this case with the NCSA thing, it's a typical situation where budgets have no room for the fudge factor because the organization has a price-driven selection process, which is wrong.
lucm, indeed.
For forty years I dreamed passionately of having my ultimate computer at home. The Apple ][ was my first "workstation, and I invested heavily and actually had two floppy drives. Then I wanted to wire wrap myself an 8086 multitasking computer. Then I had to have an IBM PC/AT. But I knew in my heart that there were these special "expensive" machines called "workstations" that ran on some strange OS called UNIX. I discovered the RISC philosophy, and began dreaming of owning a RISC workstation. I found out about Sun Microsystems, and SunOS 3.1. I began to dream of having one of these 68xxx based Sun workstations someday. Intel based PCs continued evolving, and every time Intel coughed, machines sped up considerably. But each time the architecture sped up, Microsoft released another version of their OS (if you can call it that) that took most of the ram, and ate most of the cycles. So no matter how fast the Intel boxes were, Windows based machines were not showing the performance I expected out of a "workstation". In the mid-nineties, I took a contract to set up a demonstration of an application running on a contemporary Intel Windows box and a contemporary Sun SparcStation. I had to open the Sun box to add memory, and I was stunned by how little electronics was on the circuit board for the ten thousand dollars they wanted for this "workstation". I just could't mortgage the house to buy something with such trivial hardware. Besides, I just hated the look and feel of OpenLook. I worked on contract at Autodesk briefly, and was exposed to a number of contemporary workstations, HP, SGI, MIPS,... But as cool as the X-Window system was, it still seemed somewhat raw, even with Motif. At the commodity level, I began to see computers with multiple CPU's, and operating system support in Windows NT and 386BSD as well as Linux. The day came that I heard about Apple bringing out a new operating system based on the Mach kernel, with 386BSD on top, and their GUI layer on top of that. I was intrigued and it didn't take me long to realize I was getting old and grey trying to compute with Microsoft software. Eventually I invested in the workstation I had been waiting for all those years. I bought a Mac Pro 8-core 3.0GHz 16GB-ram machine, and almost four years later it is still kicking ass, and I haven't seriously considered the need to upgrade to a newer Mac Pro, as my current one still has computing capacity to spare, and plenty of memory for what I do. Sure I paid a little more for an Apple branded Intel box, But almost four years later, Processors are not significantly faster (clock rate wise). The newer processors are said to be more efficient internally, but as I said, I haven't found the need. My entire suite of software I work on compiles in 58 milliseconds. What more can I say. So it never turned out to be a spare, or some HP cpu, or an IBM Power. I fell in love with an x86 workstation. To me, a supercomputer. To me a cluster (8-cores).