SGI into Rackable Systems, and Sun into Oracle

Following SGI's $25M purchasing by Rackable Systems on April 1, now Oracle announced "Oracle Buys Sun" with $7.4B on April 20.

After IBM withdrawal of Sun's deal, we concerned about Sun's future.
Now Sun Microsystems seems that they succeed in finding a suitable boatman for Sun ship. I wonder why Sun did not propose their purchasing to Oracle first.

However, according to the article of NY Times "In Sun, Oracle Sees a Software Gem ", "Oracle executives emphasized that they did not regard Sun as a hardware company" although "Safra Catz, Oracle’s president, called Sun a “modern technology company.”
This message has something on our chest in HPC point of view.

According to Wall Street Journal "Oracle Snatches Sun, Foiling IBM", they reported a slightly different message about Sun's hardware business, "Safra Catz, one of two Oracle presidents, said Oracle intends to make Sun's hardware operations a profitable business unit."

In any cases, it is true that Oracle expects to transform Sun to a highly profitable organization, and they must make new decision about investment for Sun's system development, such as for HPC, that demands long-term resources and much money. For example, on April 14, Sun made a large announcement about advanced hardware - new blade servers, new family of network products including InfiniBand, storage systems, and large HPC system Constellation which is equivalent that Sun promises much investment for these users. I, therefore, cannot understand why they are not so sensitive to cost as if they neglected buyer's concern before conclusion.

Not surprisingly, Oracle executive said they could make Sun profitable, and industry analysts estimated that Oracle’s cost savings from Sun operations on April 20 in New York Times. It is difficult time, in particular, for Sun's hardware people.


The icing on the cake (Leg of a snake in Japanese):
I feel something wrong about the WSJ's headline "Oracle Snatches Sun, Foiling IBM". Actually NYT introduced that Mark Loughridge, IBM CFO, suggested "a Sun deal did not pass muster" in April 20's article "I.B.M. Affirms Earnings Goal Despite Sales Slide."
It looks more reasonable idea that IBM already lost concern and left from the Sun deal.

Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?

I am reading the book "Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? (Nikkei, 2002, Japanese translation)" so late. The book is written by Louis Gerstner assuming IBM CEO from a non-IT company in 1993, brought dramatic success to terrible IBM and left IBM in spring of 2002.
I passed intentionally such a book during an IBM employee because it was too close to enjoy for me. Instead of reading, I always imagined some scene of Dumbo from the title. Now I know that this must be a rich and excellent book.

According to the book, Scott McNealy, CEO, Sun Microsystems frankly said to some journalist that they should select a dull person for a new IBM CEO whoever assumed a CEO when the selection board looked for an IBM CEO.

Anyway, Gerstner revived IBM. And relative to HPC, IBM shipped the first scalable parallel system SP1 in 1993 and ignited a fuse of coming HPC prosperity of IBM, led by Irving Wladawsky-Berger.

In March, 2009, just after sixteen years, WSJ showed a rumor about acquisition proposal of Sun Microsystems to both HP and IBM.

Gerstner clearly said that he never bought companies that did not contribute profit but revenue in the book. Hence, we may imagine Gerstner's attitude about the rumor a little bit if he were the CEO.
Now we hold our breath expecting conclusion by Samuel Palmisano whom Louis Gerstner appointed to his successor (if the WSJ's rumor is true.)

RIKEN Symposium “The Third Generation PC Clusters”

RIKEN Symposium, titled “The Third Generation PC Clusters", was held on March 12 in RIKEN Wako Institute, sponsored by RIKEN Advanced Center for Computing and Communication, and RIKEN Next-Generation Supercomputer R&D Center.

All the presentations (almost in Japanese) are now available from the RIKEN symposium program site.

The symposium was interesting to me since RIKEN reviewed their five year experiences about RIKEN Super Combined Cluster (RSCC) that was the seventh of TOP500 list in June, 2004 and will be transferred to next system, RIKEN Integrated Cluster of Clusters (RICC) to be operated from August, 2009. Aggregated computing capacity of RICC is estimated 100+ 106+ 64 TFLOPS, i.e., 270 TFLOPS according to Kurokawa-san’s presentation (the sixth presentation)

Relative to the Next-Generation Supercomputer (NGS) of Japan, a six floor building framework appears in Kobe Port Island (it looks like a Blue Waters building, and is higher than it), and prototyping and evaluation phase for NGS system units are scheduled this year. Along such schedule, the role of the RICC is enhanced to:
1. Provide application development environments for NGS
2. Provide HW/SW testing environments for post-NGS
3. Provide higher performance systems for current users
4. Develop new application areas of RIKEN,
according to Dr. Ryutaro Himeno, director of RIKEN Advanced Center for Computing and Communication.

In the afternoon sessions, there were three GPGPU presentations, such as performance evaluation with HIMENO benchmark. The RICC will attach 100 GPGPUs with a 100 node-multi purpose cluster system.

More details with many pictures are published by a mycom’s reporter in their web site (in Japanese).