The demise of "Big Iron" supercomputing was pitched against pay-per-hour supercomputing services, as the founders of computing companies Dell and Sun Microsystems took aim at each others' businesses in speeches last week.
Headlining at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco on different days, rivals Mr Michael Dell, founder and chairman of Dell, and Mr Scott McNealy, founder, chief executive and chairman of Sun Microsystems, presented differing keynote speech visions of how companies could achieve better performance at lower cost with their information technology (IT) investments.
The need for "Big Iron" - large, costly supercomputers - is going to be eliminated by the nimbler, cheaper option of clustering servers, argued Mr Dell. Dell's chief rivals offering supercomputers are Sun and IBM.
In his keynote, Mr Dell announced the formation of Project MegaGrid - a joint effort between Dell, Oracle, Intel and EMC - that is intended to find the best ways to form clustered server - or "grid" - computing architectures.
"We want to reduce the cost, improve the quality of service, and allow better management," he said during a keynote that was introduced by a filmed Thunderbirds spoof featuring a villain named "Big Iron", who tries to force customers to buy more computing power than they want.
The heroes were puppets of the chairmen or chief executives of each MegaGrid company, as well as Microsoft chairmen Mr Bill Gates.
The MegaGrid, which comprises a 128-node cluster of Dell servers running operating system Linux, is based at Dell's Austin, Texas headquarters.
To date the project - which is not a product - has produced a number of white papers and has one customer using the general configuration, Overstock.com, according to Dell.
Mr Dell argues that customers - particularly the small to medium businesses that are the focus of marketing drives by Oracle, Dell, and their rivals - can achieve significant cost savings by running a database across a clustered server architecture.
He also welcomed news of the sale of IBM's personal computer arm to Chinese manufacturer Lenovo.
Speaking at a private press briefing, he said such consolidation was part of an ongoing trend that would continue to absorb many existing retailers.
Mr McNealy, in a characteristically joke and jibe-filled keynote, belittled the idea that Dell can offer cheaper supercomputing power through its Megagrid than Sun can through its own supercomputing services offering.
Sun - which has been losing market share for both its large computer workstations and for Solaris, its version of the Unix operating system - charges dollars per CPU (central processing unit) hour for its N1 Pay-Per-Use Grid Computing service.
Mr McNealy said the all-in cost for the same processing power on a four-processor Dell server was at least 40 per cent higher.
Mr McNealy said it was "orders of magnitude cheaper" for companies to buy per-hour computing because Sun owned both Solaris and its integrated Java applications.
Customers opting for clustered options from rivals Dell, HP or IBM would need to pay separately for the hardware and the operating system and then probably a set of applications, he said.
In addition, Sun would be open-sourcing its "family jewels", Solaris, in the New Year, he added.
This will place pricing pressure on Red Hat, whose version, or "distribution", of Linux is widely used by businesses.
