First, the worst….

Who copied who? Does it really matter? Michael quotes a Sun blog where Sun appear to claim that they beat the SP2 with the Sun Enterprise 10K. It's actually quite an amusing piece both the article quoted and the article itself.

Firstly, I must out myself; I worked for IBM resellers in the late 90s working on RS/6000s and SP2s and then I was the Data Centre architecture for a company which made extensive use of SP2 technology in a commercial environment; so I have a bit of soft spot for them.

Indeed, I was a certified SP2 specialist for my sins but I have worked on most type of Unix box. So please take my comments with a pinch of salt.

From Ken Ow-wing's blog

The reminds when when when IBM clustered a bunch of RS 6000s
togeather around a moderately performant switch/network, called it an
RS 6000 SP2, and  placed Oracle Parallel Database on it for the backend
database for applicatioins such as SAP R3.Sun created a competitive
program to compete with the  IBM SP2 with the earliest  ancestor of the
Sun Enterprise 9000 server, The Sun Enterprise 10000. which went GA
1997. This was Sun first Supercomputer based on the designs acquired
when Sun purchased the Business Systems Divsion of Cray Research (the
first and foremost SuperComputer company of that era).

You may notice that the Sun Enterprise 9000 is still around and
you do not hear much about IBM SP2s. Sun won. I will spare you more
details.

The SP2 does still exist but it's not called the SP2 any more; the SP2 is now the Cluster 1350 and Cluster 1600; that's why you don't hear much about it, it's changed its name! It is an MPP Cluster and indeed a completely different beast to the Sun Enterprise 10K.

Although it did at times get deployed in a commercial environment; that's not what it's sweet spot was and OPS was a real pig to get working! It was massive in the realms of Seismic and Scientific processing; I had colleagues whose job was to install SP2s on survey ships.

And before the days of Gigabit ethernet; if you wanted to chuck large quantities of data around between your nodes; the SP2 switch was an excellent way of doing so! If an SP/2 was deployed in commercial, it was more often to utilise the switch and excellent (but rather unique) management tools to enable a large number of servers to be managed from a single point.

Much of the technology from the SP2 has found it's way into the BlueGene devices. The SP2 lives on!

The Sun Enterprise 10K was an excellent large SMP box and IBM did try to compete using the SP2 but it was always tough because managing a single box was always easier than managing a whole bunch and coding for a single box is often easier than trying to write MPP code. But if you really want to do massively complex deep computing which needs thousands of cores, MPP is often the way to go.

However IBM did manage to get their SMP story together and Sun never really got their MPP story together; IBM can now offer excellent SMP performance and couple it with their MPP know-how to deliver clusters of large SMP devices.

Sun have a 1% share of the TOP500 Supercomputers, IBM have more than a 37% share of the TOP500 Supercomputers using technology derived from the SP2 technology. That doesn't look a defeat to me!

So perhaps IBM did copy Sun and decide that they needed large SMP boxes but they took the idea and ran with it; coupling it to their own strengths and produced something which was greater than the sum of the parts. And hell, it wasn't Sun trying to buy IBM at the beginning of the year was it?

Perhaps EMC are copying HDS but perhaps they too will run with it and produce something better? Innovation in IT is rarely revolution; it is always building on what has gone before.

As a customer, I really don't care who is doing the copying; it's not art and I don't need the original, I just need the one which works best! Tell me why yours is better not that you were the first!

As kids, we used to have a rhyme…

Sometimes it's not best to be the first!