[Bioclusters] FPGA in bioinformatics clusters (again?)

[Tim Cutts]

On 14 Jan 2006, at 5:07 am, Farul Mohd. Ghazali wrote:

> This has been an interesting and very eye opening discussion for me.
>
> Joe, I'm aware of SGI's woes. I was using SGI RASC as an example since
> I don't have much experience in hardware accelerators in general aside
> from a brief fling with Paracel 5 years ago. I do like their
> interconnect and SSI technology but their long term viability isn't
> great.

The death of SGI has been predicted for many years.  I very much  
doubt it is imminent.  Various Western governments (mostly the black  
helicopter brigade) have way too much invested in SGI's unique  
product line to let them go under.  SGI are in the same situation as  
Cray; the US government will keep them alive as long as they need  
support and no-one else has a competing product.  This isn't actually  
that bad a position to be in.  It's the same reason that VMS will  
never die, and that HP are being forced to support Alpha for many years.

Take all this with a big dose of In My Personal Opinion (other than  
my first sentence, which is definitely fact!)

Tim

-- 
Dr Tim Cutts
Informatics Systems Group, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
GPG: 1024D/E3134233 FE3D 6C73 BBD6 726A A3F5  860B 3CDD 3F56 E313 4233