Entries filed under “InsideTrack”

insideHPC has confirmed that Marc Hamilton has been named by Sun Microsystems to lead Sun’s worldwide HPC sales efforts.

Marc worked with Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim four years ago to architect Sun’s re-entry to the HPC market with Sun’s Galaxy line of x64 servers including the popular “Thumper” x4500 storage server, leading to Sun’s first big HPC win at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. At the time of its deployment in April 2006, the TiTech cluster was the fastest supercomputer in Asia Pacific, and the first Japanese supercomputer to surpass the Earth Simulator on the Top500 list. Marc and Andy then went on to work on the Sun Constellation System used to build the world’s largest x64 based supercomputer in the world at TACC.

For the last year, Marc has been responsible for all Sun systems sales in the Americas as Vice President of Sun’s Systems Practice; he will continue in that role as well as taking on the new responsibility for head of worldwide HPC sales.

“A lot of people think of TACC as a 1-off supercluster”, says Hamilton, “but we have sold over 2000 TFlops of Sun Constellation System clusters to customers around the world and despite the recent financial turmoil around the world, customers continue to invest in HPC systems”.

Marc told InsideHPC he is very excited about taking on the new role of leading worldwide HPC sales for Sun, and says readers should look for a number of new Sun HPC product announcements at the upcoming SC08 show.

The InsideTrack loves to read email from readers, especially when said email contains information like this.

When I interviewed Cray, Inc. for the HPCwire feature piece on their recently announced CX1, I asked who they were partnering with on the manufacture. I asked, but didn’t expect an answer, because companies rarely answer such questions. And understandably so.

But the InsideTrack is ever curious, and evidently it’s not the only one. An insideHPC reader was noodling around on Google the other day on an unrelated hunt for information, and stumbled upon this URL: cray.vxtech.com. Following that link takes you to the web configurator for the CX1, complete with shopping cart and all. The  configurator works well, and covers all the bases, including optional support and a shipping case.

Their house brand product line includes small supercomputers, so they have some experience in the area. The vxtech.com-hosted configurator matches the one on Cray’s site page for page.

Who is VXTech you ask? They are a division of CIARATECH, a Canadian company owned by the Hypertec Group. According to the company’s marketing collateral

VXTECH designs, develops, markets, services, and supports a variety of server systems including NEXXUS4000® Personal Cluster, the acclaimed VXRACK® high density blade server, FUSION1200® SMP Server powered by ScaleMP™, VXR-3DT® Supercomputer Architecture, VXPRO® rack-mount/tower servers, VXSTOR® networked storage and GRAPHIXX® high-end workstations.
The company’s state of the art products are based on the Intel IA32 and IA64 architectures and utilize Linux and Microsoft operating systems.

The existence of all this Cray branding and product information on VXTech’s site implies that either: VXTech is Cray’s CX1 partner, or they were in the running at one time and got really aggressive building an incredibly convincing mockup for their proposal to Cray which they haven’t taken down yet. The latter seems like a worse business practice than letting the CX1 configurator sit out on the web unprotected, so my vote is that VXTech is Cray’s CX1 partner.

The DailyTech has had several posts over the last few days chock full of tidbits from leaked memos and shady sources. Good stuff! I’ve gathered three here so you can amaze and astound your less-informed friends

First up, the DT has a leaked memo with details on the Phenom CPU and motherboard availability.

More details of the AMD platform launch that included the Phenom, the RD790 chipset and the RV670 graphics processor surfaced early in November. DailyTech reported early in November 2007 on the pricing structure of the Phenom processors ranging from about $280 to $330 USD.

An AMD internal memo shows the AMD Phenom 9700, 2.4 GHz processor is slated for mid-December availability. Allocation for the Phenom 9600 running at 2.3GHz has been pushed back to a Q1 2008 date.

Up next, also from AMD, are details on the tri-core processor scheduled for 2008 and 2009

AMD picked up big headlines the day before Intel’s Fall Developer Forum with the announcement of its upcoming tri-core processors.

AMD’s original release did not specify if this tri-core processor, code named Toliman, would be a totally new processor or merely a stripped-down version of the existing Agena core. The answer, it appears, is both.

And to round it out, we have leaked info on the forthcoming Intel Penryn mobile processor

Initial Penryn mobile processors will launch exclusively with a 35W thermal envelope. Existing Merom mobile processors (T7000-series) also fit inside the 35W envelope at standard voltage. However, with the Montevina Centrino refresh in the second half of 2008, new Penryn mobile processors will receive a 25W TDP rating instead.

Looking further into the future, Q3 will see the addition of another group of 45nm Penryn-based processors using Intel’s Montevina platform. These processors will feature 6MB of L2 cache in Core 2 Duo form and 12MB of cache for Core 2 Extreme models — both will feature 1066MHz FSBs along with support for DDR3 memory.

Dave Raffo at SearchStorage.com is reporting that BlueArc will hold off on its IPO until sometime in 2008. The NAS vendor filed for its public offering back on September 7.

According to Raffo:

A financial analyst who follows storage said investors “are doing more due diligences on IPOs now,” and said it could hurt BlueArc that the stock prices of storage systems companies Isilon and Compellent have dropped drastically since their recent IPOs. The analyst said BlueArc might want to show another quarter of solid growth to help its case.

Read the full blog entry here.