After El Reg’s article on HPC going down the gurgler at Oracle/Sun now HPC Wire are suggesting the same:

I, myself, have spoken with two credible sources that told me HPC engineering talent is also being axed. Although this has been rumored to have been going on for some time, the recent RIF last week was said to cut particularly deep.

One thing I hadn’t noticed though was:

If I still haven’t convinced you that Oracle is cutting HPC from its lineup, consider that the company has no exhibit at the Supercomputing Conference (SC10) in November, and as far as I can tell, is offering no presentations. Given that this is the largest HPC exhibition of the year, this should be a clear signal that Oracle is going to be leaving the teraflopping and petaflopping to others.

Now back at SC’09 in Portland I asked the Sun folks (whilst the whole Sun/Oracle deal was going through) what they thought, and they said they reckoned it would be OK because Oracle had already told them they would have a booth at SC10. Well sadly it seems that’s not the case and to me that is the clearest indication that Oracle are exiting the HPC market. Of course they won’t say that (Oracle don’t seem to say much at all, even to the OpenSolaris folks, and when they do it doesn’t see to be very nice).