If you've heard me blather about my technical accomplishments for any length of time, then you'll hear me brag about the Boeing CPS project. It was by a good measure the most ambitious project I have ever been involved in. The short end of the story was that I showed how I could get 500 databases to run concurrently in memory. I performed that minor miracle with the help of a a guy who knew LoadRunner inside and out and a team of techs at HP. You see this was done on a massive HP Superdome machine. I did this about four years ago at HP's Cupertino campus.
It turns out that HP has just sold off the property where such levels of supercomputing research, testing and debugging was done. This thus marks the end of an era, because the dudes I worked with up there had a bit of the shakes at the time. So if you ever heard me snark about Mark Hurd, it had something to do with the vibe they had knowing at the time that things were not going as well as they should have been. I was very impressed by the staff for the three weeks that I was up there, but I could see that we were sorta alone. I mean here was some of the coolest big iron available, when the enterprise IT world was still freshly adapting 64bit computing - the one thing that restored my flagging faith in Windows. I could work with 32 processors and 64GB of Ram. How sweet was that?
Well now that we know some of Google's four year old magic, it's not very sweet. And if that campus was the last place HP engaged massive computing with companies like Boeing for doing stuff that required that level of compute power, then this sale to Apple represents another piece of inevitability for cloud computing.
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