[Beowulf] dollars-per-teraflop : any lists like the Top500?

[Bogdan Costescu]

On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 5:11 AM, Joe Landman
<landman at scalableinformatics.com> wrote:
> At the end of the day, the fundamental question we are debating is, does
> the "prestige" of working with a top university/national lab have any
> real tangible value that you can ascribe to the bottom line, does it
> actually impact sales.
>
> I posit that the answer to this is a resounding "no".  You obviously
> disagree.

I also disagree, but I have another point of view: the fact of working
with a top university/national lab can be important for the
development of the product or line of products. A top
university/national lab is considered top because it has clever people
who are renowned for their way of thinking and/or published results;
given a new (type of) parallel machine, they might come up with
amazing results and/or might allow them to become even more famous -
their publications will mention the (type of) parallel machine on
which their results were obtained and other people looking to obtain
similar results or looking for even better results (=competitors :-))
will become interested. This doesn't necessarily mean that they will
buy the same (type of) parallel machines now but, if the results were
amazing enough, the _next_ generation of parallel machines from this
or other vendor will be able to achieve the same amazing results
because, by then, buyers will ask for it. So it effectively becomes an
investment in the future.

Bogdan