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.

It's purely speculation, but one would think that Microsoft would simply reprimand its employee in these circumstances. However, Nokia and Microsoft undoubtedly have a confidentiality agreement -- to try desperately to protect Nokia's existing handset sales -- and perhaps Nokia insisted on Marini's scalp. Few if any people like working in a "police state" environment, though. I wonder how this firing will affect the Windows Phone development team's morale.

So if one woman can produce one baby in 9 months, does that mean if you assign 9 women to the job you'll get one baby delivered in one month?

There are lots of workloads that are inherently single threaded (and probably always will be). If you've got a bigger, faster, more powerful CPU (or vertically scalable server, which fast shared memory and super fast I/O), that'll be a better fit for those sorts of workloads. IBM zEnterprise mainframes are the preeminent examples of the type, and they're selling extremely well. Different servers for different missions.

I'd say no. IBM isn't gaining its server marketshare with predatory pricing. Yes, their top-end equipment is nice, but IBM has also been cutting their prices regularly. (That's very easy to see in their mainframes, for example, where it's quite transparent.) Predatory pricing means less-than-superior stuff that is priced at superior rates. If I'd vote for anyone fitting that description, I'd vote for Oracle/Sun. Oracle has done nothing but squeeze the remaining Sun customers as hard as possible while doing less than the bare minimum to stay in the server business. It's not pretty. :-(

The IBM System z mainframe CPU is most definitely a "CPU that matters." You just have to respect 5.2 GHz clocked (continuous) cores, and mainframe growth has been huge in recent years. IDC says IBM z now has 9% of the total server hardware market, making it bigger than Sparc, MIPS, and ARM servers combined. I tend to think of IBM z as the Apple Macintosh of servers: once written off prematurely but now widely admired for its innovation/quality and (more importantly) for its rapid marketshare gains.

Actually, I wouldn't put Sparc and MIPS on that list. ARM is only just starting to get interesting (for servers).

Somebody upthread mentioned BOINC, which is a great idea for many parallel-oriented compute-bound problems. However, while making your project compatible with BOINC is necessary, it's usually not sufficient. The problem is marketing, to convince enough people to run your work. World Community Grid, sponsored by IBM, is free and is an excellent way to solve that problem. You can submit a proposal, and if approved you'll quickly have lots of BOINC-powered computing working on your problem.

Meanwhile, IBM's newest AIX 7 supports systems all the way back to POWER4 -- systems which were introduced a decade ago. Moreover, IBM just lengthened the standard priced support periods for AIX 6 and AIX 7. And IBM introduced support for AIX 5 running in AIX 7 PowerVM.

U.S. (and British) universities continue to dominate the international rankings from QS World, The Times, etc. Moreover, at least in the U.S., the top universities are certainly not "cash-strapped." (I only wish I had a fraction of Harvard's endowment.) Public universities are cash-strapped only because their associated state governments are, but their core business (educating students) is performing quite well. Public universities have been able to raise tuition rates without significantly impacting demand. The comparative value of a university diploma continues to climb, and universities tend to be counter-cyclical to a major extent. English has become the undisputed standard language for global commerce, so that also tends to favor American and British universities. And the barriers to developing a strong positive reputation are high because of strong university network effects and the market value of centuries of history.

The net present value of a college degree in the U.S. is greater than $100,000 plus the two years of tuition saved. However, if you were going to drop out anyway, it's a good deal. Or, if you can drop out for a minimum period of time, take the gamble, then go back, it might be a somewhat good deal.

According to press reports, Sun didn't accept IBM's best and final offer, which was only a couple pennies per share below Oracle's eventual winning bid. With hindsight, it appears IBM smelled a rotting corpse. Sometimes losing honorably is the big win.

According to IDC, in the 4th quarter of 2010 Oracle/Sun had $883 million in server hardware revenue. Thus, on a quarter-to-quarter basis, Oracle was down substantially in the 1st quarter of 2011 (to $773 million). Oracle had what's called an "easy compare" -- very easy. I'd really like to see the unit shipment numbers, though, because I strongly suspect Oracle had to raise unit prices substantially to even make that $773M.

IDC also reports that IBM's System z mainframe hardware (only) revenue was $1.0 billion in the first quarter of 2011. From IDC's report it seems that counts only the z/OS machines and not the mainframes running other operating systems (e.g. Linux). Year over year, the IBM mainframe grew the fastest of any server type, up 41.1%. In other words, IBM's mainframe hardware business alone was about one third larger than Oracle's entire hardware business. Impressive and not impressive, respectively. I think IBM is more or less the Apple of the server industry, the only one left doing any substantial R&D and concentrating on qualities of service, which helps to explain why IBM mainframes contain 5.2 GHz CPUs, for example, when nobody else can get into the 4's. (Mainframe folks used to have to explain clock speed discrepancies, with justification. Now they don't even need to do that.) Sun used to be a big innovator, but, very sadly, that was long, long ago.

In other words, IDC is reporting that Oracle raised prices. That strategy works for a quarter or two, maybe. But it's a going out of business strategy.

Well before the Internet you could find as much "alternative" information as you could ever possibly read on all kinds of news events, including the Kennedy assassination, the Moon landing, and the Cold War, as examples. Racists (which is what "birthers" are) have always had their own kooky sources of "information." The Internet adds no new dimension to this ages-old human characteristic to believe something in spite of all evidence. As another example, the world's religions had absolutely no problem promulgating their views before the Internet, and for centuries the sun orbited the earth.

I think NEC has already started to transition ACOS to X86. (Itanium doesn't offer any value-add to ACOS except perhaps avoidance of endian emulation.) But who cares? ACOS is exclusively supported in Japan, is in maintenance mode only (like Hitachi's VOS3 and Fujitsu's MSP and XSP), and has even less marketshare than those Japanese competitors. If you collected all the Itanium chips NEC sold in a year to run ACOS they'd easily fit in a shoebox.

HP has very little software to offer, so with major software vendors (Microsoft, Red Hat, and now Oracle) fleeing Itanium, it certainly isn't good news for HP. Oracle Database is probably the most popular software product running on HP-UX, as a matter of fact, but Oracle's announcement represents the end of the line. Oracle has a lot of other significant products, too, like Tuxedo, WebLogic Application Server, and Siebel, among others. Ironically IBM may now be the biggest vendor of Itanium-compatible software. Of course this Oracle announcement is self-serving, but it's also brutally smart business strategy. Itanium really is dead as a doorstop without popular software. This move also kills HP's aspirations of overtaking IBM any time soon, and it also kills one of HP's more profitable business lines. (Well played, Larry.)