They just barely beat...
systems that are dubbed "homemade" on this list. Sun had a total of four entries and edged out "homemade" - which had only three. I'd like to insert a joke here, but I don't think I can top that one...
Sun Microsystems has suffered from a hate-hate relationship with the supercomputing world over the past few years. The shift to Linux clusters caught the company totally off guard, and resulted in Sun vanishing from the Top500 supercomputers list. That's hardly the "right" position for a company that prides itself on selling …
One reason is that Sun has so many commercial customers with large installations that would likely rank in the top 500 but they aren't focused on HPC, only on their work. It's a huge bit of work qualifying a system for the list - not much profit in that.
I would say Sun does a terrible job getting their large customers interested in the list.
This is what Sun doesn't get. IT development has a huge fixed cost and fairly low variable costs, so a smart company used HPC to sell very large systems at a low price to cover the fixed costs. I guess this is part of why Sun can't figure out how to be profitable and is at a 12 year low.
Mr Mojo Risin