According to an article posted on El Reg, Oracle has purportedly axed a large portion of the remaining Sun HPC group. Details seem to be scarce on the matter so far, but folks familiar with the halls of Oracle say that resumes are out and about. The article indicates that most of the HPC sales force is now gone. Those left are now out selling Oracle Exadata V2 data warehousing products.
From their article:
A member of one software company in the HPC space, who requested anonymity because of partnerships with Oracle, contacted El Reg to say that résumés of Sun employees who had been working on HPC projects were flying into his email box. It’s unclear how many people were ever in Sun’s HPC organization, which spanned systems, storage, switches, and software, and it’s equally unclear how many were left after Sun’s and Oracle’s several rounds of layoffs in the past few years.
Prior to the Oracle acquisition, Sun was clawing their way back into the HPC market. Outside of the big NSF Track-2 system at TACC, they had been quite successful. Many moons ago, HPC was a $2billion a year business for Sun.
Sun’s original HPC business actually came from Cray. They bought the Cray 6400 business and turned it into the “Starfire” Enterprise 1000 series. They also picked up “WildFire” from Silicon Graphics as the basis for a shared memory interconnect.
If this news is, in fact, true; we wish all the folks wrapped up in this the best of luck. For more info, read the source article here at El Reg.