IBM cancels Blue Waters

IBM and NCSA have issued a joint statement announcing the cancellation of the Blue Waters supercomp. I confess this has caught me as a surprise -particularly after all the publicity that this project had gathered- to the point that I thought it might be some sort of bad joke when I first saw it. But it wasn't. Now NCSA will attempt to develop a new proposal for a supercomp to be operative before the end of 2012 using the same budget. From speculation on HPCwire it seems IBM is simply no longer interested in spending so much into technology from which it does not profit, even if this means less bragging rights for them. Under this scenario I wonder about the costs that Fujitsu spent on K. K and Blue Waters have some similarities (both are non-GPU machines using chips specially well suited for HPC) and both Fujitsu and IBM might have been involved in similar costs and trade-offs.

On the other hand, the planned 20PF BlueGene/Q "Sequoia" machine, also from IBM, is still on the roadmap to be deployed. Maybe this move only means that IBM wants to focus on its BG/Q technology for future high performance computing