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IBM Sells pSeries Cluster to Max Planck Society

IBM said this week it has sold a 5 teraflops cluster of its p5 575 servers to the Max Planck Society, a consortium of German research institutions, which will double the computing power that the institutions have at their disposal to run simulations to around 10.2 teraflops. The bulk of the 86 eight-way machines will be installed at the Fritz Haber institute, which is doing research in materials science, including various nano-materials. The p5 575 is probably the densest computing node in the computing, cramming four 1.9 GHz, dual-core Power5 processors into a 2U rack-mounted chassis. (While this is great, a rack full of p5 575s also consumes 83.2 kilowatts of juice.) The Max Planck Society already has a cluster of 32 big pSeries SMP servers that delivers just over 5 teraflops of computing power.

Big Blue Promises to Open Up Cell Processor Specs

It is a coincidence of timing, but IBM and its partners in the Power.org consortium held a summit in Barcelona, Spain, the same week that Apple would be moving off the PowerPC platform and onto Intel processors for its computers. IBM is obviously very keen to put the best face forward on PowerPC after Apple, one of the original PowerPC partners, split, and to that end IBM announced 11 new partners in the Power.org, adding to the 17 companies who formed the organization in December 2004. The new members are: AboveMicro, Anyka Cayman, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Celestica, DAFCA, Forte Design Automation, Rapport Incorporated, Teak Technologies, TimeLab, Universal Scientific Industrial, and Venture Corporation Limited. The Barcelona Supercomputing Center is the clear anchor member in Europe, having recently built a cluster from IBM's PowerPC 970-based BladeCenter JS20 blade servers in Madrid. This machine has 3,564 of IBM's 2.2 GHz PowerPC 970 chips, and delivers 20.5 teraflops of sustained number-crunching power. Most of the other members are chip designers, software firms that sell chip design applications, or provide turn-key electronics that use processors. The original Power.org members include: AMCC, Bull, Cadence Design Systems, Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing, Culturecom, IBM, Jabil Circuit, Novell, Red Hat, Sony, Shanghai Belling, Synopsys, Thales Computers, Tundra Semiconductor, and Wistron. Interestingly, Thales is announcing a dual-processor embedded system based on the PowerPC 970 chip aimed at the avionics industry.

In addition to adding new members to the Power.org consortium, IBM said it would provide the specifications for the "Cell" processor, a future chip derived from Power cores that it has been working on with Sony and Toshiba for computers and consumer electronics such as game machines and HDTVs. The Cell chip is at the heart of Sony's PlayStation 3 console, and is expected to be used in a variety of electronics. IBM is also planning to provide certain software libraries to make use of the Cell chips as open source software, including a software development kit and maybe even a version of Linux tweaked for the chips.

AMR Says Small Manufacturers, Services Firms Looking at ERP Software Bigtime

According to a recent survey of businesses in the manufacturing and services sectors done by AMR Research and Managing Automation magazine, small businesses who do not yet have ERP solutions are getting fixed to buy them, and those that have recently installed them are looking to expand what they are doing.

In a survey of 550 companies, the small companies polled (those with fewer than 500 employees) were only using real ERP software 27 percent of the time. Midrange companies (with 500 to 2,499 employees) had ERP software installed 57 percent of the time, and large enterprises (with more than 2,500 employees) had ERP systems 70 percent of the time. It is important to note that 70 percent of the companies polled were in the manufacturing sector, while only 30 percent were in the services sector. AMR and Managing Automation found that 16 percent of companies participating in the survey were evaluating an ERP system for the first time this year, and that another 40 percent of companies polled had just completed their company's initial ERP rollout in the past two years. About half of the respondents said that they would be making substantial changes to their ERP systems in the next 12 to 18 months. Of course, how much of that is by choice--considering how much consolidation is going on in the ERP business--is unclear.

Google Launches Summer of Code to Show Students Open Source Software

Search engine giant Google is a user of open source software technologies, and while it does not make its tweaks to its core open source programs available to the general public--Google has offered some code and APIs--the company knows it has to contribute to the open source community in some way to be perceived as being a good citizen.

To that end, Google has launched the Summer of Code program, which will pay student to contribute to one of 40 open source software projects as well as to programs under way at Google itself. Here's the deal: You sign up at Google at the Summer of Code Web page and if you complete an open source project by the end of the summer, Google will pay you $4,500. If you want to submit your own idea for a project to one of these groups, Google is cool with that, but if just you're are out of ideas and short on cash, Google has posted all of the things-to-do lists from the 40 open source projects together and you can pick your project from those lists.

Black Duck Gets $12 Million in Second-Round Funding

The venture money spigots seem to be opening up a bit, and Black Duck Software said this week that it has secured $12 million in second-round venture capital funding to help it fuel its growth. The funding was lead by Fidelity Ventures and Intel Capital and SAP Ventures, the investment arms of the chip maker and the ERP software maker, also tossed some dough into the Black Duck nest. The initial investors who put up $5 million in July 2004 for Black Duck's first round of funding--Flagship Ventures, General Catalyst Partners, and Red Hat--also lined Black Duck's nest in this round of funding. In addition to the funding, Black Duck and Intel signed a technology and marketing agreement to optimize Black Duck's protexIP software licensing compliance software for Intel's 64-bit Xeon servers.

IBM Wants to Help ISVs Deliver Software as a Service

IBM recently unveiled a new program to help developers of ERP, CRM, and other business software change the way they sell, deliver, and support their wares. As part of its new Software as Service (SaS) program announced in late May, IBM is providing ISVs with technical, sales, and marketing resources to help them transition to a services delivery model. Big things are expected from the Software as a Service (SaaS) delivery model, which is the newly coined industry term for application service providers (ASPs). According to IDC, the SaaS model accounted for $4.2 billion in sales in 2004, and it will grow at an annual rate of 21 percent through 2009, when nearly $11 billion will change hands. To view more information about IBM's program, check out its Software as a Service Showcase Web page, where about 40 solutions from 20 ISVs are currently on display.

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