I honestly had nothing to do with the article http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/05/ibm_bluegene_web where IBM describes that they can host the whole internet on one "system". As you can guess I do not work for IBM, so I have no great interest in agreeing with them. But I did publish my commodity article way before The Register. However, as a IT person we cannot ignore that IBM does do some good things now and again. Especially when the competitors encourage them to improve. Well that is what market forces do when we do not have monopolies.

Some quotes from the article where IBM agrees with me, or I agree with IBM. You decide.

"So, you're working with systems in a sense very similar to the individual x86 boxes that make up most clusters. Although the unique packaging of the Blue Gene systems along with their low-power cores allows IBM to create a more reliable computer - by more than two orders of magnitude - than commodity boxes which fail all the time."

Now I have only been working in IT for 22 years and seen lots of trends, fashions and designs repeat themselves. A bit like the downsizing, upsizing, rightsizing and funsizing processes we go through. Now am I the only one with the opinion that commodity computers as used in clusters may not be the best solution, if I am then so does the writer of this article. Who said:

"You can't help but get the feeling that IBM and others are on the right track by exploring these hybrid models which place an emphasis on low-power chips and tight, SMP-like design where needed. Maybe we'll all look back at clusters and laugh in a few years."

Could this be the voice of experience.

But seriously, I do like clusters, laptops, PC's, large servers. There is correct place to use all of them and a wrong place. When trends become fashionable the IT business starts to use the latest fashion for the wrong purpose. Then after some spectacular failures we get sensible again. Technology corrections I call them, just like corrections in the financial marketplace.

Well as I work for Sun I can shamelessly plug the fact that if you want to have a systems that you can upgrade while they are running to very large sizes,such as 2TB of RAM 256 cores and 737GB/s memory bandwidth and 244GB/s I/O bandwidth. Then look no further here it is http://www.sun.com/servers/highend/m9000

You also do not have to do the cabling yourself to connect all the CPU's/commodity boxes, it is all done internally by the backplane. This way your datacenter will look less like a spaghetti factory.

Ok I say within 3 years time we will have even larger SMP systems where you could have a present day 4096 cpu cluster in 4 large SMP systems, well that is a statment that puts me in between a rock and a hardplace