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There’s nothing like a vendor war to keep things interesting and exciting, and Oracle’s recent de-commitment from future Itanium processors has launched a great one. According to Oracle, Itanium is the deadest of dead parrots – not pining for the fjords, not tired from a prolonged squawk, but well and truly dead. Intel begs to differ.

So what do you think? What have you heard? To get a handle on this, I’ve put together a short survey (about 6 minutes) asking about Oracle’s aims, potential next steps, and impact on the industry. If you take the survey, we’ll send you a link to the results when they’re published. You can take the survey here. We’re clearing the decks to get this one done quickly, so get your responses in now – we’ll crunch the results fast and show ‘em to you as soon as we can.

The latest development in the fight came during Intel’s analyst/press briefing on their new Xeon E7 x86 processor, in which Kirk Skaugen (GM of Intel’s Data Center product group) spent a fair amount of time spent discussing Itanium – namely, how it fits into Intel’s present and future.

In this Register HPC channel webcast we talk to Doug Fuller, a computational scientist at Oak Ridge National Lab, who’s chairing the SC11 Student Cluster Competition. This takes place in Seattle in November.

We talk about how this competition is really a test of the real-world skills that HPC managers use daily. The students, like HPC managers, have to get the most out of their existing systems while dealing with resource and time constraints.

In the SCC, student teams must architect systems to provide the highest performance possible while staying under a 26 amp ceiling. They have 48 hours to run an HPCC benchmark plus four real-world HPC applications. The team that gets the most work done on their system wins. (Read more below…)

2010 was the breakout year for NVIDIA’s Tesla division, according to Tesla VP Andy Keane, who spoke at the company’s recent Industry Analyst Day. I think it’s pretty obvious that he’s right, and a quick review of the last year tells the story.

Three of the top five systems on the Top500 list sport NVIDIA GPU accelerators. At SC10, Tesla GPUs were everywhere. They showed up in almost every hardware vendor booth, and most of the ISVs were either boasting about a CUDA-enabled piece of their application or discussing their future plans for it.

When I looked at the news Wednesday morning, the first thing I thought was, “I picked the wrong week to give up sniffing glue.” Or maybe Oracle did. Either way, Oracle’s announcement that they were halting future development on HP-UX/Itanium versions of their products touched off a firestorm of phone calls, emails and tweets that just won’t let up.

TPM covered the basics in his excellent story here. Snarky ‘Itanic’ jibes in the headlines aside, HP-UX based Unix systems are in use in a large number of customer data centers, as are IBM Power Unix systems and Oracle SPARC boxes. These big iron boxes have moved from being the hot new thing a decade ago into more of a mission-critical, mainframe-esque role in midsized and large data centers.

What first struck me about the Oracle press release is how it doesn’t jibe with what I’ve heard (repeatedly) from both Intel and HP. It said, “Intel management made it clear that their strategic focus is on their x86 microprocessor and that Itanium was nearing end of life.”