Five of us from Plura attended the SuperComputing 2008 conference in Austin. Although we did not set up a booth, we still had a great week and talked to lots of potential customers and vendors about Plura and our coming infrastructure needs. To our new friends, we hope you enjoyed the show as much as we did and had a safe trip home.
I’ve attended several SuperComputing conferences in the past and it is interesting how it has evolved. Two years ago, GPUs and FPGAs were exploratory. This year, they are everywhere. Many people are predicting that the current GPU focus is temporary until Intel and AMD start embedding many smaller cores on the chip (see Intel Larabee for Intel’s version).
GigaOm makes a good point that SuperComputing is more and more about software. Everyone knows how to build large clusters these days. The software and infrastructure to tie them together to solve meaningful problems is the critical piece. We’re working hard to solve real problems that are difficult on traditional infrastructures.
Also, one quick brag. The new Top 500 list of fastest SuperComputers was released during the show. Even in our limited private beta state, our current Plura capacity would place us in the top 10 SuperComputers in the world based on GFLOPs. We’re pretty proud of this given that our private beta started less than a month ago.
Plura Processing 
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