(2009-11-23) Blank Ardent Cray Nsf

At Ardent, Steve Blank discovered that a research institution of the smartest scientists, when funded by NSF grants, becomes an Enterprise buyer. The search for commercial Super Computer applications was good news for Ardent, as this was our business as well. But bad news was that the supercomputing centers had concluded that they could justify their existence (and budget) only by buying the biggest and most expensive supercomputers Cray Research made... All their peers were buying Cray's, and they wanted one as well. We had support from the scientists and researchers who had bought one of our machines and were beginning to see that distributed computing would ultimately triumph, but bureaucracy marched on, and we lost the bid.