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Two Debian Project Members Die in Car Crash

U.S. Commits to Building World's Fastest Supercomputer

Rather than pick any one architecture, Oak Ridge is going to rely on a mix of architectures to create this behemoth, which will complicate the task of deciding whether the cluster is the most powerful supercomputer in the world. That said, the deal is a big win for rebounding vector supercomputer maker Cray. Oak Ridge will be expanding its Cray X1 parallel vector super to 20 teraflops this year and will add a 20 teraflops "Red Storm" Opteron-Linux supercluster in 2005. The Argonne National Laboratory, which is networked to Oak Ridge, will be installing a 5 teraflops Blue Gene/L Linux supercomputer (IBM's third commercial Blue Gene sale). In 2006, Oak Ridge will add a 100 teraflops Cray X2, the kicker to the X1, which will be upgraded to a 250 teraflops machine by 2007. Silicon Graphics apparently has been awarded some DOE contracts for the Oak Ridge upgrade, but the details were not available at press time.

The massively parallel vector supercomputer known as Earth Simulator, built by NEC for the Japanese government, is the current top-end supercomputer in the world, with 40.9 teraflops of peak performance and an impressive 35.9 teraflops of sustained performance. The 252 processor Cray X1 at Oak Ridge is rated at a mere 2.9 teraflops of sustained performance and 3.2 teraflops of peak performance. Both the NEC and the Cray designs, unlike many clusters, use vector processors and are very efficient at what they do. On many Unix and Linux superclusters, 60 percent of the aggregate computing capacity goes up the chimney.

Forrester Says IT Spending Picking Up

IT spending has inched up at large North American companies so far in 2004, Forrester Research says. The Massachusetts market research firm says a study of 870 CIOs and IT decision-makers indicates that the total spending increase this year, compared with 2003, will amount to 2.4 percent, up from the 1.7 percent figure Forrester predicted in December. Companies with the most growth in their IT budgets are in the transportation, construction, consulting, and financial services industries, where the increase in total IT spending is expected to top 4 percent this year, the research firm says. Forrester says IT shops are using their 2004 budgets to "get back to basics" and are upgrading core technologies, like those for security, applications, and PCs. Mobile technology spending is also up, and so is ERP-related spending for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. Forrester also sees more spending going to portals, content management systems, and business intelligence software, while spending has leveled off for SCM, CRM, and procurement software products.

IBM to Beef Up Tivoli Provisioning Software

IBM will today give a sneak preview of a tweaked release of its Tivoli Provisioning Manager, the heart of the server provisioning software that IBM acquired when it bought Think Dynamics last year. While the original software created by Think Dynamics was predominantly made to control the provisioning of the HP-UX Unix environment, IBM will in June launch Provisioning Manager 2.1, which will run on Linux, Windows, AIX, HP-UX, and Solaris servers and will be able to control the provisioning of bare metal servers and logical partitions on Linux, Windows, Unix, and OS/400 servers.

For those of you who are new to the Tivoli Provisioning Manager, the program is used to set up the operating system and application stacks on servers and to keep them patched as software is updated. The adjunct Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator works with the provisioning software through a policy-based engine that controls how servers, storage, and network capacity are provisioned based on business rules (such as: make sure the Web site and the database servers have enough processors to yield decent response time). Sandy Carter, vice president of marketing for the Tivoli unit, says that the Provisioning Manager 2.1 will be available in June and IBM could have new pricing at that time. The current release costs $1,100 per server processor plus $50 per network node; she says that a typical customer spends around $20,000 for a basic setup.

In addition to the new release, IBM is offering a bundled configuration on its xSeries 335 servers that has "one button provisioning." The provisioning software has been preconfigured to implement a Windows or Linux operating system on the machine, plus a WebSphere stack and a Tivoli monitoring agent. It also preconfigures the network resources, and can do the whole shebang automatically within an hour. IBM is offering another software bundle on iSeries or pSeries server iron that allows for the automatic provisioning of application servers for the SAP ERP suite running in conjunction with its DB2 database. IBM will also debut workflows that hook into the Provisioning Manager engine that can provision HP-UX servers as well as machines running Microsoft's Exchange, SQL Server, and Active Directory as well as IBM's own DB2 database and WebSphere middleware, plus VMware virtual partitions on X86 iron, and application stacks from Siebel Systems, SAP, and Citrix.

Intel Server Chip General Manager Moves to CEO Post At Cadence

Designing sophisticated electronic components and getting them to market successfully is a tricky business, and very few people in the world probably know this as well as Mike Fister, former general manager of Intel's Enterprise Platforms Group. Fister knows the challenges that chip makers, both large and small, face as they try to innovate with new technologies, which is why Cadence Design Systems, one of the big players in the electronic design automation (EDA) software area, has tapped Fister to become its new CEO and president.

As a senior vice president and general manager at Intel, Fister had a fair amount of control over the server, workstation, chipsets, and related technologies that drive a fair portion of Intel's $30 billion in annual sales (exactly how much, Intel will not say) and arguably a very large portion of its billions in profits. Fister, who is 50, spent 17 years at Intel and was responsible for bringing the later generations of Intel's 80486 processors (the ones without the bugs) to market, as well as bringing the Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III, Celeron, Pentium II Xeon and Pentium III Xeon chips to market. He has also been one of the champions of the 10-year, 64-bit Itanium line of chips codesigned by Intel and server maker Hewlett-Packard and, of late, has been the person who has explained why Itanium is better than Opteron and then reversed that position to launch the Xeon with 64-bit extensions, in February. As a self-proclaimed gear head, the Intel job was a lot of fun, but Itanium has been something of a bummer until recently, when performance finally got on par with RISC/Unix processors. Because of his close association with the Xeon and Itanium roadmaps, which have been radically changed a number of times in the past year, there will be plenty of talk about whether Fister left or was asked to leave. Officially, Intel says that Fister is resigning.

The jump to Cadence is an unexpected but logical one. The company has 4,800 employees and is a $1.1 billion provider of software and services to many of the largest and smallest chip makers in the world and one of the big players in a $4 billion industry. With Paul Otellini tapped to be president and chief operating officer at Intel last year and presumably the next CEO at the company, when Craig Barrett retires next spring, Fister's upward mobility was probably limited. By moving to Cadence, he becomes CEO and president in charge of one of the companies that Intel will tap to try to give it the tools to create all of the new sophisticated processors it needs to make to stay in the market. Fister, as one of the guys most frustrated by the limitations of current EDA tools to speed up design, ferret out flaws and bugs, and improve yields, is the best person to sell Cadence tools into Intel.

This is an obvious reason why Cadence wants to hire way one of the top guns at what could turn out to be its largest customers. But, according Ray Bingham, current CEO at Cadence, who is ascending to the chairman role, the company wanted Fister as its top executive because he is the one who forged all of the partnerships with workstation and server markers that drove Intel's share of those markets ridiculously high during the past decade.

The role of CEO is not necessarily going to be easy at Cadence, however. The big chip makers play the EDA software makers against one another to drive down the cost of the software, and a key metric for the semiconductor business--ASIC design starts--is decreasing. However, Cadence has some advantages and plans to attack new markets and new geographies to build its business. The company touted its open framework and database software, which makes it easier for companies to deploy, use, and integrate with other tools. Fister, who is on his first day on the job, called the shot just as he would have at Intel. "You just have to be confident that you can set a standard and then go ahead and execute," he said in a call with Wall Street analysts and reporters yesterday. "People will pay--and pay differentially--if they can offset some of the human cost and potential waste as they drive efficiencies, because this affects their profitability."

Bingham and Fister explained that Cadence planned to "identify adjacencies" to their core EDA software that directly affect yields and then try to gain new business; they also suggested that the company might work from the chip out to higher and higher abstraction levels to encompass complete systems. Finally, as chip making moves ever into new markets where environmental laws are arguably less stringent than in the United States and Europe and labor is cheaper, Cadence will pursue business with chip upstarts. Many of these companies will inevitably compete with Intel, as well as with other Cadence partners, such as IBM, Fujitsu, HP, and Agilent.

Over at Intel, Abhijit Talwalkar, who was vice president of the company's Enterprise Platforms Group and general manager of its Platform Products Group, which means he reported to Fister and was responsible for the development of chips, chipsets, and other features of workstations and servers, is taking over Fister's job as general manager of the whole enterprise enchilada. Talwalkar joined Intel in 1993 and has worked at the former Sequent Computer Systems (now part of IBM) and Lattice Semiconductor. Intel also announced that it has broken its Software Solutions Group away from the Enterprise Platforms Group and that co-managers Richard Wirt and Will Swope now report directly to Otellini.

1.6 GHz Itaniums Start Shipping

Intel said this week that it has started shipping the new 1.6 GHz, 3MB cache Itanium DP processor, which it announced a month ago for two-way machines. This chip, like the 1.4 GHz, 3 MB cache part announced at the same time, is made using a 130 nanometer process. The 1.6 GHz chip dissipates 112 watts of heat as it runs, a little bit less than the 130 watts that the 1.5 GHz, 6 MB Itanium MP processor dissipates. The 1.6 GHz Itanium DP chip costs $2,408, considerably less than the $4,227 that Intel is charging for the 1.5 GHz Itanium MP part. All of the Itanium processors support the 64-bit implementations of the HP-UX and FreeBSD variants of Unix, as well as various Linux implementations and Windows.

IDC Says Grid Sales to Hit $12 Billion by 2007

That's why IDC has taken a stab at sizing up the grid market. Chris Willard, the analyst who follows the workstation and high performance computing markets for IDC, says the company reckons that the grid computing market will grow to represent $12 billion by 2007. If you think that is a lot of money, remember that the IT industry was about $1.1 trillion in 2003. So this is just a small trickle of business. You also have to realize that IDC counted the value of any server or device connected to a grid as revenue for grids. So this is not simply the value of the software and other devices that go into making up a grid. This is a reasonable way to calculate the value of the grid market, to be sure, but it is not the same thing as counting money in the pockets of grid vendors. This number will be a lot smaller.