On 8/5/2010 5:30 AM, Ashish Nabira wrote:
Answer is simple. HPC business is negative margin, and Oracle don't do
any negative margin business.
<http://www.sun.com/solaris> * Ashish Nabira *
Enterprise IT Architect
*Sun Microsystems, Inc.*
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On 05-Aug-10, at 1:14 AM, Paul Gress wrote:
On 08/ 4/10 02:26 PM, David Brodbeck wrote:
On Aug 4, 2010, at 10:55 AM, Paul Gress wrote:
Larry sees the profitable market as servers and databases. HPC, won't help
databases. HPC (high performance computers) basically are derived from servers
with additional components added to them to make them function as a
workstation, this is my interpretation, I'm sure some one will probably correct
me if I'm wrong.
There are certainly desktop High Performance Computing applications, but it's
much more common for HPC nodes to be servers of some description. Generally
they're biased towards large amounts of CPU power, and/or have multiple GPU
cards installed, to provide lots of computational speed.
Thanks for the added info. In you opinion, does HPC have any benefit
for database applications. I imagine the high CPU count will but the
GPU count won't, as in CUDA. If this is true, why is Oracle not
participating in any conferences or even updated their own web page
(http://wikis.sun.com/display/HPCCommunity/Home), last updated on Oct
2009..
Paul
HPC is almost completely reserved for simulation these days, which means
heavy use by academic (and quasi-academic) organizations, with some
government stuff thrown in as as well. I'm also of course seeing usage
for render farms. :-)
The key thing about the HPC market is it is very cost-sensitive, mainly
because of the vast numbers of compute nodes that are bought. I'd not
say a "negative margin" area, but certainly, nothing like the margins
Oracle typically goes for. I certainly don't see the HPC market willing
to cough up the dough for the Oracle Premium Support contract per node,
and without that, Oracle has very little (institutional) reason to sell
into a market that's not going to make much money for them.
And, before anyone asks, Databases don't really do HPC clusters yet. At
least, databases in the sense of a traditional RDBMS (things like MySQL
read-only content distribution farms run just fine, but that's not the
same as being able to run a back-end DB for something like OLTP).
And, as always, I do not speak for Oracle, not do I have non-public
knowledge about any Oracle product, business practice, or policy.
--
Erik Trimble
Java System Support
Mailstop: usca22-123
Phone: x17195
Santa Clara, CA
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