US Army Linux Supercomputer

[Gerald Combs]

Joel Spolsky has a good explanation for why software is either really
cheap or really expensive.  From
http://discuss.fogcreek.com/newyork/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=1389 :

"(4) With software sold in corporations, as soon as your price gets up
 in the $3000 level, the amount of approval it needs is so absurd that
 you are not going to sell products without a salesperson making a few
 visits. Hiring the salesperson, sending them out to make presentations,
 hotels, airfare -- now it costs $50,000 to get the sale done just in
 sales closing costs. That's why you see a lot of software products at
 $100,000 and a lot under $3000, but anywhere in-between and it's
 impossible to make sales. (It's sort of funny -- these big corporations
 create so much bureaucracy around purchasing in order to protect
 themselves against losing money, but they just force the vendors to
 spend a fortune on salesforces, which results in vastly higher prices
 for the big corporations)."

Paul Taylor wrote:

> No, they are dual CPU Xeon platforms. Yes, the software is expensive. 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-kclug at kclug.org [mailto:owner-kclug at kclug.org] On Behalf Of
> Brian Densmore
> Sent: Thursday, August 05, 2004 9:07 AM
> To: kclug at kclug.org
> Subject: RE: US Army Linux Supercomputer
> 
> Low 6 figures! For a 2 node cluster? You could buy a 100 cpu Linux cluster
> from HP online for $233K!
> Holy crap. I'd be willing to bet you could get a better price by actually
> calling them. I guess the "special" software is what cost so much money. 
> I hope each node is at least a quad cpu box.
> 
> 
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: Paul Taylor
>>Sent: Wednesday, August 04, 2004 10:31 PM
>>To: 'Jim Herrmann'; kclug at kclug.org
>>Subject: RE: US Army Linux Supercomputer
>>
>>
>>The boxes I recently purchased come with 'special' 
>>application software. It
>>was low 6 figures for a clustered pair, the OS wasn't broken out from 
>>the rest of the bundled price. I would guess it was peanuts compared 
>>to the total price.
>>
>>It's the first M$ cluster I had to purchase. I'll probably buy some 
>>more over the next 18 months.
> 
> Maybe I could help you on that. Any customer willing to toss $100K around
> for a two node cluster is for me. Maybe I could write them some "special"
> application software.