More Features of Current HPCC II
One counter example (SIAM News December 99) is Akamai Technologies founded by MIT Computer Science theorist Tom Leighton and others
- Supports optimal mirror sites network topology to minimize Web Page access delays
- Nasdaq AKAM currently has market capitalization of $20 Billion
Hardware trends reflect both commodity technology and commodity systems
- SGI/Cray declining in importance and
- Sun (leveraging commercial Enterprise Servers) gains as do
- PC/Workstation Clusters typically aimed at specialized applications
- e.g. Inktomi (market capitalization $10B) uses 100’s of PC’s to provide Web Search services
Note Sun systems are “pure” Shared Memory and Inktomi are “pure” distributed memory showing architectural focus in two distinct areas with distributed memory mainly supporting specialized services