Date: Thu, 15 May 1997 13:46:26 -0500 From: Jonathan Lemon <jlemon@americantv.com> To: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> Cc: "Russell L. Carter" <rcarter@consys.com>, pgiffuni@fps.biblos.unal.edu.co, fenyo@email.enst.fr, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Cluster Computing in BSD Message-ID: <19970515134626.58267@right.PCS> In-Reply-To: <199705151725.KAA15126@phaeton.artisoft.com>; from Terry Lambert on May 05, 1997 at 10:25:37AM -0700 References: <199705151553.IAA22312@conceptual.com> <199705151725.KAA15126@phaeton.artisoft.com>
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On May 05, 1997 at 10:25:37AM -0700, Terry Lambert wrote:
> > > computers, but I can live with it :-). (With six boxes, a common
> > > scientific process could take nearly 1/6 of the time on a fast network).
> > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> >
> > The difference between "could" and "does" is the
> > reason for the failure of (nearly) every business unit that sold
> > highly parallel/cluster systems.
>
> Except Goodyear. And Thinking Machines Corp. And Cray Computing.
> And Cray Research. And Fujitsu. And...
>
> I think the list of successes so vastly outnumbers the list of
> failures that your parenthetical "nearly" is *way* out of place
> here.
Hmm... let's see failures:
Denelcor
Kendall Square Research
Multiflow
Cydrome
CDC
Convex (aborbed by HP)
Burroughs Scientific
Scientific Computer Systems
Floating Point Systems
Supertek (bought out by Cray Research)
Alliant
Myrias
Tera (okay, so not dead, but not producing anything)
...etc
This doesn't include companies that attempted to sell parallel computers,
but eventually shut that division down, eg: Evans and Sutherland, BBN,
and others.
Cray Research is effectively gone, having been absorbed by SGI, right?
I'd say that Thinking Machines is on it's way out as well; the CM-5 is
obsolete, and I don't see a replacement on it's way. Goodyear isn't
still building MPP's either, AFAIK.
That's not a long list of sucesses.
--
Jonathan
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