HP and IBM go head-to-head in supercomputing race

by
in hardware on (#3NT)
Things are heating up at the high end again - a good thing, considering the growing need of supercomputers for intense number crunching in climate simulation, financial processing, and more. Hewlett-Packard is taking on IBM in high-end supercomputers , the latest sign that H-P is doubling down on technology hardware while IBM pulls back from the market.

That's a big surprise coming from HP, whose recent financial tribulations have led some to wonder if they'll even pull out of hardware all together .

Instead, HP is releasing two big systems: the Apollo 6000, consisting of a network of small machines, and the bigger, water-cooled Apollo 8000, which will compete with IBM and Cray for the prize. Whoever takes the prize, it will permit this latest round of super-charged computing power to allow guys like this one to use research computers to mine bitcoin. Brilliant, dude.
Reply 2 comments

HP finally makes use of the Apollo brand name (Score: 2, Informative)

by marqueeblink@pipedot.org on 2014-06-17 02:12 (#24E)

Apollo Computer was the original "engineering workstation" company that got started around 1980 and was an early market leader, but which lost the race to Sun. Apollo had serious technical talent but they made at least two mistakes: they developed their own operating system, and their system program language was Pascal.

Re: HP finally makes use of the Apollo brand name (Score: 1)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-06-17 13:51 (#24J)

I hope it brings them good luck! It's been depressing watching HP the past couple of years - rife mismanagement, competing strategies, and not to mention the complete gutting of the braintrust that came with purchase of Compaq and thus DEC. Then the last looney of a CEO decides they're going to give up the hardware business and focus on services. WTF?

This makes me think there are still pockets of sanity in the place, which in the past couple of years, would have been hard to believe.