Tyan chief has vision for personal supercomputers

THERE is a very interesting interview today over at Digitimes with Tyan CEO Symon Chang.

It seems that Tyan has a yen for "personal supercomputers" and sees Microsoft Excel as the kick up the proverbial for the whole market.

These personal supercomputers are effectively server clusters boxed in a PC chassis. You can use them for a bunch of traditional supercomputing tasks, of course, but the potential killer app is spreadsheets. Huge spreadsheets. Big, big ones.

Who is going to want to use a spreadsheet like that? Financial services firms, of course, and the people who earn big green figuring out risk exposure and similar stuff. These people are always being told to move to something dedicated to the task but getting them of Excel is like weaning a one-year-old off its dummy.

Microsoft sees the market too and is aiming to plug the hole with its HPC version of Windows as well as making Excel as much a server tool as a client. This is a boat that might have been floatable for Itanium but without the necessary software support that ship has sailed. µ