I just got back from an HP show where I had some interesting conversations regarding the crisis that hasn't seemed to have happened yet.

The key to the Sherlock Holmes mystery, "The Hound of the Baskervilles" was this: Why the dog didn't bark?

Why hasn't the so-called multicore crisis been seen as a crisis? Why isn't there any angst over lack of parallelized applications and engines? Why is IT still buying multicore servers when they aren't doing development that can utilize that architecture?

One answer has to do with virtualization. The hypothesis is that the initial transition to multicore has been welcomed with open arms as IT managers sought a way to reduce power and cooling requirements, and multicore servers combined with virtualization software made that easy, inexpensive, and readily available. "Yes boss, we had a problem with heat and power, but we have taken care of it." Multicore crisis averted, because these boxes helped solve a real problem for IT. A different problem, but still a real one.

So the sales of 4 and 8 core servers have been robust and the hardware guys are happy, the software guys are happy, and IT is happy - what could possibly go wrong?

It is that these sales will not continue at larger core counts. It doesn't take an MBA to understand that there are diminishing returns -- there is no reason to go to a 32 core server when 4 8-core servers will do the job. Those 4 are less expensive than the single 32-core machine, we have put our eggs in 4 baskets instead of one, and we already are following that pattern. So the crisis that didn't happen when single processor servers became multicore has been delayed until now, when there is no obvious reason for IT to buy the larger core count boxes.

For companies like HP, AMD, and Intel, this bump in the road is coming later than predicted, but it is coming -- virtualization did not eliminate it. The smart people in these companies are beginning to ask if the forestalled crisis is arriving, and how they can help IT continue to gain business value from continued investment in larger core count machines.

What are you going to do with a 32-core machine? Break it up into 32 app servers? Or take advantage of the power of concurrent programming to enable high performance commercial computing (HPCC)?