HPCwire: I concur with Fran Berman's conclusions in her recent feature article in HPCWire [440274]. Indeed, we must set strategic priorities and concrete goals to ensure US technical leadership. However, I suggest that we must understand and acknowledge, not rationalize, the decline of the US HPC industry over the past 15 years and embark upon a much more specific new National Economic Security Initiative for the improvement of the US HPC industry. This, in my opinion, is mandatory if we hope to continue to lead the world in the development of intellectual property, the most basic commodity of our future international competitiveness.

What we have is a market where everyone, even IBM in my opinion, is losing money at the high end. There is just not enough high-end revenue to go around to sustain profitable operations, much less fund product development. Fortunately, IBM and HP have sufficient sales at the low-end to carry their losses from the high-end. Sun has virtually exited the high-end. The same may be said shortly for HP, given its new CEO's reputation for driving profits and the recent announcement of up to 14,500 personnel cuts. It's interesting to note that in 1993, with a 70 percent high-end market share, Cray sold C-90s for $2,500 per megaflop and, of course, made money. Today, the going rate for cluster systems is as low 25 cents a megaflop with no single dominant supplier. Rather than develop real technical differentiation, most vendors are seeking market visibility by trying to impress the market with "macho FLOPS" on the top 100 list.

Full letter...

Original article by Fran Berman on HPCwire...