I am in Sun Enterprise 10000 training all week. It’s a nice way to come off of vacation, I must say.

It’s really cool to learn about these machines which are, at there core, Cray Super Computers. Sun purchased the technology from SGI back in the day for something like US$12M and now sells each E10K for somewhere around US$2M (not including disks!). So I’d say it was a good purchase as they’ve sold around 3,000 E10K’s (the purchase of an E10K almost always includes a platinum support contract as well, which is a good deal for the Sun and the customer).

It’s crazy to think about how I read some book that mentioned Crays back in the day. I think it was the interesting but horribly written Jurassic Park. I remember my girlfriend at the time telling me this long story about how they were using these types of computers to do chaos theory work (that’s a funny thing in itself, no), and I know now that no matter what I do in life, I will never do anything so interesting as that with an E10K, but will probably use it in telecommunications or finance. Oh well—somebody has to write the check.

Anyway, these computers are really cool and probably a very marketable and good skill to have. Afterall, if people spend the kind of money they’re spending on these machines, don’t you think they’ll be willing to spend more money on somebody who’s certified to work with them? I hope so, at least.

Of course, distributed and clustered computing will go a long way toward making these types of machines less important and necessary. However, the big companies will probably stick to the “known quantities” for a while longer.