That's my first reaction. I doubt they'll turn down the money but HP has a habit of destroying things with good potential. They had a good RISC CPU that they and Intel turned into the Itanic. They acquired OpenVMS but threw it away instead of spinning it off. They're now about to acquire the source of some of the greatest workstations and NUMA machines ever made. And probably trash it somehow.
I don't know. Maybe I'm paranoid. SGI was just one of my favorites and their NUMA tech is still awesome. Hate to see it get death-by-acquisition.
I still have fond memories of SGI systems. I've had Iris PRO's, Indy's and O2's over time. Their NUMA systems Origin/Onyx were amazing. and they had C++ compilers with usable error messages!
1. http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/tandem/ 2. http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/tandem/TR-86.1.pdf
Thanks for links. Didn't have them.
EDIT: Thanks twice given one of those links may have answered a question kragen had in another thread about why no heap allowed in passive, process pairs. I'm thinking they're stateless whereas the active ones are stateful. Heaps need stateful.
There's not much demand for really large-scale NUMA any more, at least not enough to keep an organization of that size alive. The rest of the HPC biz is just racking and cabling whatever Intel, NVidia and (sometimes) Mellanox give you. It's a margins-based race to the bottom and many of the people in that business are indeed, bottom-feeders.
