By the way, my quip about the “atrociously unprofitable” industry wasn’t a slap at Linux.
Supers have been unprofitable for the entire length of my career in computing (since the early 80’s). The truth is, they grab lots of headlines, they push back boundaries in hardware architecture and design... and they have such a narrow, specialized market that they’re black holes for hardware vendors, sucking in their entire cash flow and balance sheet. That was the case with CDC, then Cray, Cray Research, Convex, Connection Machine, n-cube... now SGI.
Worst of all, many of them are built for government contracts - limited production markets at best, on scant margins.
Were I a VC, and some really bright guys came to me with a business plan on how they were going to make it big with a next-gen super, I’d do everything in my power to convince them to drop the idea and pursue something else.
Supercomputers are a great resume’ items, but they’re horrible at putting money into your retirement account, much like the specialized workstations of the mid/late 80’s. I had a chance to work with Symbolics machines (as a front end to supers at the time, no less), and as much as I loved the hardware which was fast at the time, and much more reliable than something like Sun HW/sw, and the Genera environment was slicker than weasel snot on cold polished tile, I could see it was going to be a dead end, financially and going forward in my career.
Eh ... whatever.
I can’t say as it makes much difference to me anymore. I’m retired now, taking it easy, after some 30 profitable years in highend workstations, supercomputers and Linux. ;).