Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-marketing (129 mails)

[Alberto Passalacqua <albert.passalacqua@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello all,

high performance computing is in rapid expansion and its applications
to many fields of research and industry are or are becoming common
practice. Numerical simulation is today not only a tool for scientist
but it is used in industry, medicine, biology, chemistry and other
fields to optimize a design, verify hypotheses and obtain precise
data.

I guess someone is thinking now "and what has this to do with
openSUSE?" :-). Well, it is simple: many tools used in high
performance computing, especially in research are open source, and run
on Linux. Others are not open source, but still run on Linux, and
Linux is considered by many the platform of reference to build HPC
clusters.

Now, I see some opportunity for openSUSE in this sector, and it is of
sure interest for Novell too (see top500, to find our loved chameleon
making those beast green :-)). SUSE Linux Enterprise is already one of
the supported platforms by various commercial tools used in HPC to
perform simulations and process data, but it could do better and be
more visible, because most of the time the attention goes to RHEL,
being it more present and better known, in spite of its limitations,
especially when it comes to HPC workstations, where its use might be
quite limiting for the user. At least it is in my experience, being
HPC what I do, and being RHEL what I have to use on my workstation.

One opportunity to gain some visibility might be to take part at some
conference on the topic. For example, in November 2009 there will be
in Barcelona the OpenSource CFD (computational fluid dynamics) (
http://www.cfd-online.com/Forums/openfoam-news-announcements/66180-announcing-open-source-cfd-international-conference-2009-a.html
), which was born around OpenFOAM ( www.openfoam.org ), an open source
code for fluid dynamics and now open to more products. From what I
read, last year it attracted quite some attention from the industry,
with names like Volkswagen, Procter & Gamble, Jaguar Land Rover, Audi,
*Intel* and *Red Hat*.

It could be of interest to promote openSUSE and SLE in a sector which
might appear quite hidden, but gives access to both academic and
industrial environments at once, and is surely growing (for those
interested, take a look at the ANSYS' stocks and reports). I think it
would be good for Novell (I say Novell because these conferences are
technical, and people is interested in solutions, so generic marketing
does not fit, and it would be better if the presenter is expert in the
field (IT engineer with some experience with clusters and parallel
computation)) to be present at events of this kind, and maybe on the
long run plan around a packaged solution, which might be developed on
openSUSE (most of what is needed is on OBS already) and extended to
SLE as done, for example, with the -edu project.

Best,
A.
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