Mainframes vs. The Grid

April 26, 2007

Nick Carr has an interesting post on his blog about some new iron from IBM and Sun. What I found interesting was the comment towards the end about specialized machines of the kind IBM and Sun excel at and the large global grid of the kind Google has built. Through most of the last decade, commodity hardware has ruled the world of HPC, at least the world that I have been exposed to. Google is a classic example of a business that has built a huge infrastructure from commodity hardware. On the other hand, there are certain applications that would benefit greatly from specialized machines. Large scale numerical computing would be one of them.

So in a nutshell, does it have to be one versus the other? One sells on volume, the other fills specific niches.

Technorati Tags: High Performance Computing, Sun, IBM, Google