Opportunistic acts of desperation, living in past glory

Novell has let loose quite an ambitious press release. It claims that Novell dominates supercomputing and also suggests that it has conquered the top 3 facilities.

Supercomputers around the world are running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell(R). According to TOP500, a project that tracks and detects trends in high-performance computing, SUSE Linux Enterprise is the Linux* of choice on the world's largest HPC supercomputers today. Of the top 50 supercomputers worldwide, 40 percent are running on SUSE Linux Enterprise, including the top three -- IBM* eServer Blue Gene at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, IBM eServer BlueGene/P (JUGENE) at the Juelich Research Center and SGI* Altix 8200 at the New Mexico Computing Applications Center.

But wait! This is no mainframes!

Red Hat is not to be neglected, but before getting to the 'meat' of our argument, watch this: Supercomputingonline.com did a little "copy, paste, and then edit" press routine. Sys-Con does this a lot and SJVN was accused by Dan Lyons of doing the same thing at times. It looks almost like plagiarism. See the press release from Novell (above) for comparison:

World's three most powerful supercomputers run SUSE Linux Enterprise from Novell: Supercomputers around the world are running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell. According to TOP500, a project that tracks and detects trends in high-performance computing, SUSE Linux Enterprise is the Linux of choice on the world's largest HPC supercomputers today. Of the top 50 supercomputers worldwide, 40 percent are running on SUSE Linux Enterprise, including the top three -- IBM eServer Blue Gene at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, IBM eServer BlueGene/P (JUGENE) at the Juelich Research Center and SGI Altix 8200 at the New Mexico Computing Applications Center.

Unfortunately for Novell, the world's most powerful supercomputer runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux. As this new story suggests, there's probably a mistake here. Maybe Novell relies on out-of-date information and claims some sort of a victory while it lasts, i.e. just before Red Rat formally claims the honour.

The story Novell tells its investors and customers in this case is not new, but it seems as though it's bound to 'expire'. Novell take advantage of this last opportunity and SUSE on supercomputers is bad news for this reasons at the very least. Novell is Microsoft's HPC Trojan horse (for Windows). ⬆