[geeks] anyone know about this? 72-core, 48GB computer?

[Patrick Finnegan]

On Sunday 04 October 2009, gsm at mendelson.com wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 03, 2009 at 10:55:23PM -0400, Patrick Finnegan wrote:
> >Matt left SiCortex to go teach at a college.  I don't think that a
> >lifestyle change like that can be called "jumping ship".
> 
> It does not matter why he left. The fact was he left, and the team
>  was broken. The questions that the VC's were left with was how
>  critical was he to the operation of the company, how quickly and
>  smoothly could he be replaced and would anyone else leave?
> 
> A "lifestyle change", or a job change, or any other change is
>  irrelevant, what matters is he left.

Perhaps, though in this case, it didn't.

> >Also, from what I recall, the company folded because one of their
> > VCs pulled out, and then the others followed suit.

After talking to people who remembered the details better, I missed a 
detail.  One of their VCs went bankrupt, and didn't have additional 
money for them, at which point the others pulled out.

> If Matt (you must know him well to be on a first name basis) wanted,
> IMHO to keep the company going, he could of taught one course using
>  the reason that he wanted to groom a new generation of customers.
>  Leaving to quit completely says a lot of bad things about a company,
>  I'm really surprised that he expected the company to continue after
>  he left.

I may not know Matt "well", but I have had a few dinners with him and 
other SiCortex people... he is intimately interested in the education 
part of high-performance computing.  I'm not sure of the exact details 
of his departure, but other people around here that have worked with 
SiCortex (see 
http://www.bigncomputing.org/Big_N_Computing/Big_N_Computing/Entries/2008/11/18_Supercomputing_Day_2.html 
) also disagree with you.  

Here's what had to say about his departure in his blog:
http://www.bigncomputing.org/Big_N_Computing/Big_N_Computing/Entries/2009/2/21_Moving_On.html

Pat
-- 
Purdue University Research Computing ---  http://www.rcac.purdue.edu/
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