Submission + - Innovation and commoditization in high-performance
An anonymous reader writes: HPCwire is running an article about innovation and commoditization in high-performance computing. The premise is that the HPC community ought to embrace commodity components and either extend on them (as NVIDIA and ATI do with co-processors) or build specific integrations (as Linux Networx does with supercomputers). The argument is that innovation and communization are not necessarily contradictory, as other industries have learned. Furthermore, scientific discovery follows the mantra "standing on the shoulders of giants" anyway, meaning that an entrepreneur would be better off building on an existing market base. The article includes examples of how Opteron succeeded over Itanium and why offload-enabled Ethernet has a better chance of success than Dolphin Interconnect's "scalable coherent interface."