Posts Tagged ‘IBM’

IBM to buy SUN

Thursday, March 19th, 2009

IBM Global Services

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In the past, IBM has mostly focused its acquisition efforts on companies that will bolster its software and services businesses, rather than its hardware, but that may change. IBM is currently in talks to acquire Sun Microsystems offering to pay Sun at least $6.5 billion, or double Sun’s Tuesday closing price of $4.97, according to a report on Reuters.

If the two companies can reach a deal, it will be IBM’s largest-ever acquisition, pushing the company to the forefront of the high-end computer server market. Many analysts see the potential deal as a recent trend in consolidating major brands, where server equipment providers such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Cisco Systems compete for the lucrative corporate data center market to supply network equipment to high-end computers.

It has long been speculated that Sun would be bought out by a major IT company, and the company has been seeking a buyer in recent months, according to bankers. So far, IBM is leading the data center market as top supplier of servers in the fourth quarter of 2008, with a market share of 36.3 percent, says market researcher IDC.

Trailing behind in second place is HP with 29.0 percent, followed by Dell with 10.6 percent, Sun with 9.3 percent, and Fujitsu with 4.2 percent.
With Sun’s shares falling 71% in the past year, it says it would soon be cutting around 6,000 jobs, or 18 percent of its workforce.

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Project Match: IBM sends laid off workers to emerging markets

Wednesday, February 11th, 2009
Economic Map of the World: Emerging Markets an...
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An interesting concept, if you’ve been made redundant in one of their American or European arms, IBM will offer to help you make the transition to working in emerging markets. Specifically in China, India and Brazil. IBM has laid off an estimated 4,000 employees since the beginning of 2009 and is showing signs that more pink slips may be in the mail, but in order to save a bit of face, they’ve developed this program that sounds good on paper but in actuality is a great way for them to move Western talent into foreign markets, where they can pay them local salaries, far less than they’d be making back home. It’s strategic at best, but they spin it well…

Under a program called Project Match, IBM will help workers laid off from domestic sites obtain travel and visa assistance for countries in which Big Blue has openings. Mostly that’s developing markets like India, China, and Brazil.

“IBM has established Project Match to help you locate potential job opportunities in growth markets where your skills are in demand,” IBM says in an internal notice on the initiative. “Should you accept a position in one of these countries, IBM offers financial assistance to offset moving costs, provides immigration support, such as visa assistance, and other support to help ease the transition of an international move.”

The document states that the program is limited to “satisfactory performers who have been notified of separation from IBM U.S. or Canada and are willing to work on local terms and conditions.” The latter indicates that workers will be paid according to prevailing norms in the countries to which they relocate. In many cases, that could be substantially less than what they earned in North America.

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IBM’s Newest SuperComputer

Wednesday, January 28th, 2009

PhotonQ-BlueGene/Q..for Quantique : )

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IBM has devised a new Blue Gene supercomputer–the Blue Gene/P–that will be capable of processing more than 3 quadrillion operations a second, or 3 petaflops, a possible record.  It is designed to continuously operate at more than 1 petaflop in real-world situations and marks a significant milestone in computing.

Last November, the Blue Gene/L was ranked as the most powerful computer on the planet: it topped out at 280 teraflops, or 280 trillion operations a second during continuous operation.  Put another way, a Blue Gene/P operating at a petaflop is performing more operations than a 1.5-mile-high stack of laptops.

The development of Blue Gene/P seems certain to extend IBM’s position atop the Top 500 Supercomputer list, which comes out this week at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany.  IBM had 93 computers on the list when the rankings last came out in November; four were in the top 10.

Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory will deploy the first Blue Gene/P in the U.S. later this year.  Meanwhile, in Germany, the Max Planck Society and the Forschungszentrum Julich research center will start to install a Blue Gene/P in late 2007.

Others will be installed at Stony Brook University and Brookhaven National Labs (New York facilities that have collaborated with IBM on other projects) and the Science and Technology Facilities Council in Cheshire, England.

Like the vast majority of other modern supercomputers, Blue Gene/P is composed of several racks of servers lashed together in clusters for large computing tasks, such as running programs that can graphically simulate worldwide weather patterns.

Technologies designed for these computers trickle down into the mainstream while conventional technologies and components are used to cut the costs of building these systems.  The chip inside Blue Gene/P consists of four PowerPC 450 cores running at 850MHz each.  A 2×2 foot circuit board containing 32 of the Blue Gene/P chips can churn out 435 billion operations a second.  Thirty two of these boards can be stuffed into a 6-foot-high rack.  The chips and other components are linked together in a high-speed optical network.

Do you think that IBM leads the pack in supercomputing, and is this something we will see in a laptop during our generation?

 

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