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Behind the Parting of IBM and Blue Waters
An anonymous reader writes "The News-Gazette has an article about the troubled Blue Waters supercomputer project, providing some new information about why IBM and the University of Illinois parted ways back in August. Quoting: 'More than three dozen changes, most suggested by IBM, would have delayed the Blue Waters project by a year ... The requested changes caused friction as early as December 2010, eight months before IBM pulled out, leaving the project to look for a new vendor for the supercomputer. Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act show Big Blue and the Big U asserting their rights in lengthy and increasingly testy, but always polite, language. In the documents, IBM suggested that if changes were not made, the project would become overly expensive.'"
IBM told you to take your $300 million project somewhere else? If that doesn't say VOLUMES about your project management/specification process, I don't know what does.
Illinois is broke as all hell. They're setting themselves up to be the next California. I moved out around a year ago before they raised state income tax. At that time they hadn't paid any of the in state colleges what they were owed for around 18 months.
U of I also came out with a genius plan to 'lock in' your rate for 4 years, so if there is a short fall, the next year is going to have a huge jump in tuition. It's getting to the point where in-state for U of I is as expensive as out of state if you were to go to Purdue, Michigan, UW Madison, etc. Out of state tuition is up near the cost of private schools.