Since the sides couldn't come to terms, IBM took a huge hit by terminating the contract. Yeah, they get their hardware back, but it's probably not very easy to sell to anybody other than NCSA. And they have to return all the money, which means they did a lot engineering work for $0, once again with few prospects of monetizing the work in a future deal.
What were you trying to run on there, a web server?
One of the advantages of Blue Gene is precisely that its compute nodes do not run some full-featured OS that gets in your way. As HPC platform, the Blue Gene line is pretty much unrivaled in terms of energy efficiency and reliability.
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Since the sides couldn't come to terms, IBM took a huge hit by terminating the contract. Yeah, they get their hardware back, but it's probably not very easy to sell to anybody other than NCSA. And they have to return all the money, which means they did a lot engineering work for $0, once again with few prospects of monetizing the work in a future deal.
Not to mention the marketing disaster.
What were you trying to run on there, a web server?
One of the advantages of Blue Gene is precisely that its compute nodes do not run some full-featured OS that gets in your way. As HPC platform, the Blue Gene line is pretty much unrivaled in terms of energy efficiency and reliability.