It’s rapidly becoming clear that the rumors concerning Cisco entering into the server market are probably true. Major news sources, ranging from The Register to The Wall Street Journal, have written the story, and Cisco’s ‘no comment’ is, at this point, the same thing as saying, “Yeah, we’re doing it, but don’t have the data sheets printed yet.” While the company may be positioning their servers as network-centric devices (and thus not directly competitive with their server vendor partners), I’m hearing that they will look more like enterprise servers with integrated switches. I’m not sure that we’re talking a blade form factor; I’m thinking that it’s more likely to be a rack mount server. Why spend all the money/time/engineering to bring out a new chassis when you can introduce a box that fits into a standard rack?

Another thought from our executive friend.. Well, considering that it’s all probable, it may very well taste like catfish.  Of course you have to drink with it some quantum latte with a rich ‘”foam” on top! I do like the…

Received the first response below from an executive at a large HPC vendor… (See previous “SC08 + Magic 8-Ball = Obsession” post below for background.) Must be the String Theory since this is very much quantum mechanics.  And a solution…

We’ve finally finished crunching the numbers and putting together the charts for our third annual x86 Server Preference Survey. In this version of the survey, 187 people who work with x86 systems in enterprise data centers gave us their thoughts…

While wandering the floor at tradeshows, I’m always on the lookout for interesting swag. I’ve been in the business long enough to become jaded – I don’t care about t-shirts, pens, or the normal run-of-the-mill stuff. I like the quirky,…

We spent a bit of quality time with Deepak Khosla, CEO of X-ISS, Inc., a Houston-based IT consulting firm. X-ISS has been around for 15 years and has done a lot of work with HCP clusters – installing more than 40,000 nodes in the last five years and more than 5,000 nodes since 2006. While this is impressive on its own, what really caught our attention is their new managed services offering for clusters. First, a little background…

Thomas Hughes of UT Austin and Michael Miller of Johns Hopkins described the new era in disease identification and treatment that HPC is making possible. The big push is for patient-specific models that determine optimal treatments for specific individuals instead of a random population sample.

The process begins with medical imaging as we know it today: a CT scan, ultrasound, or MRI. From those information pieces, mathematical models are built. In the case of a cardiac patient, computational mechanics and a cardiovascular modeling toolkit isolate the necessary image; then a mesh template – based on technology from computational geometry – creates a 3D aspect. Fluid/ structure interaction analyses are run to determine flow patterns, which can pinpoint not only problems that exist but problems in the making: Is there a fatty deposit behind that section of artery wall? Has the aneurism grown? Is that swirly spot a place where sclerosis could form?

Loren Miller of Goodyear Tire & Rubber spoke about the company’s switch to analysis-based tire design in 1994. The traditional design – build – test process was very expensive and clearly needed to be changed, but engineers were skeptical about switching to modeling and analysis. Why? Modeling tires is difficult and complex. The simple-looking tire conceals all kinds of hidden complexity: 18 components, 12 compounds, 2 fabrics, 2 kinds of steel, and 60 other raw materials. And the rubber itself is a pain; it’s incompressible. The estimate on turnaround time for the kind of modeling and analysis the company wanted to do with the technology they had was 16 years.

What to do? Goodyear worked with SANDIA to develop codes specifically for Goodyear that slashed turnaround time. Over time, Goodyear designed its own automated design/ analysis systems and increased its Linux clusters from 16 to 128 nodes.

To date, expenditures on tire building and testing dropped from 40% of R&D budgets to 15%, resulting in $100 million dollars redirected to other R & D needs. Key product design times went from three years to one. Mr. Miller describes Goodyear as an innovation company, not a tire company, with one winning strategy: continue to invest in R&D.

Server virtualization has been a cash cow for OEMs, VM vendors, ISVs, and partners. Until now, the desktop virtualization market has been far less competitive. VMware sees an immense, almost untapped, and very profitable open ground, and they’re driving in their stake in a big way. From the beginning of the first keynote address to the analyst/ press briefings to the workshops, client products are a huge buzz in Las Vegas this week.

The best breakout session of VMworld 2008 – by far, in our opinion – was “VDI versus Terminal Services” with Brian Madden, who describes himself on his website as “an independent technology analyst, author, and thinker.” Sounds good to us; his posts will be a GCG must-read from now on!

So what did he say?