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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.'"
Isn't that the truth? IBM is definitely the consultant to call if you want to learn how to do things as inefficiently and as expensively as possible.
Yes and yet their business keeps growing and outperforming most in the services business because all their customers are complete naive fools with money to burn and no sense of value.
Perhaps you and the GP should urgently email the CIOs of all these businesses to warn them and share your great insight.
I will be a very happy software developer when people stop believing that "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". I detect sarcasm in your post, but I don't think it should be there. I respect IBM for the R&D they still do, but that's about all.
One part of the article: "John Melchi, a senior associate director at NCSA, said last week that there is a variety of vendors available, which he compared to a choice of car dealers." Then another part: "Though she declined to answer technical questions, the FOIA documents mention clock speed as an issue."
OK, supercomputer vendorscar dealers, raise your hands: how many of you have 4+ GHz CPUs to sell? Standard, commercially available POWER7 cores run up to 4.25 GHz. That's the second highest clock speed CPU in the world, and by a considerable margin. (The highest in the world? this one, at 5.2 GHz.)
Could it be that academics demanded their idea of perfection and were unsatisfied with mere best available reality? That's never happened before.
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.
Something tells me that the only reason this article exists is because of the intended pun in the title.
Unfortunately most Ceo;s are the naive fools you state. They usually have MBA's and do not have any tech background. All it is is friendship, connections and who has the biggest line of bullshit.
Amen.
which is totally what she said
It may be that other vendors appear to be able to do the project for less money per TFLOP. If (example with made up numbers) an SC based on the POWER7 cores has 100,000 cores and they cost $1000 per core, but another Intel-based SC with 200,000 cores can do the same work and costs $400 per core with the same operating cost, then the latter machine is cheaper for the performance required - which is the figure of merit.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
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.
My observation has been that some of the highest priced consultants from IBM come in the area of product specialization - products which IBM sells - and in this area, they _are_ the experts (and perhaps, the only experts) in the field. I haven't seen problems with the quality of work in these cases, but I have seen customers sour on the high fees.
But perhaps your vitriol is directed to the Global Business Services consultants - who are the ones who work on those laaarge projects. I have no first hand experience there, but anecdotes suggest that they are no worse than EDS / Accenture / and others who work in the same space.
good grief man, if you're going to blaspheme, at least try to be funny!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Sorry. I guess my title was just as full of shit as TFA's You can read the article to confirm but basically it says, "we can't give out the facts".
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
... anecdotes suggest that they are no worse than EDS / Accenture / and others who work in the same space.
And here is a lesson in how to damn with faint praise.
Such projects are always based on estimated performance numbers. It looks to me like the estimated (and contractually signed) target performance was higher than what IBM could deliver in the budget envelope and the target timeframe. Probably the technology advance was not delivering as expected. As the U of Illinois was not ready to soften on some aspects to make it fit IBM had the choice of either delivering much more hardware at a loss or to pull out.
From my (limited) search it looks like the project was signed in 2008, so back then IBM estimated they can deliver a PetaFLOP for $200M in 2011. It looks like they were wrong.
I witnessed similar situation where the machine could deliver the promised performance using a benchmarking program, but real apps were unable to get to similar numbers. Improving the software stack made the performance available to apps, but it took 2 years to get there. The hardware was performing well, but immature software was spoiling it.
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