Given (1) the importance of HPC (both scientific and strategic), (2) the size (man-power, gov. agencies, universities, and companies), scope (new hardware, energy, software), and length of this project (approaching a decade), and (3) international competition with (at least) European and Chinese exascale efforts, the $258 million dollars seems quite paltry.
I ask this in all seriousness - is IBM still relevant today? I don't actually know how they make most of their money. I assume it comes from legacy enterprise support. The last I heard about them was Watson years ago, and I don't think they ever successfully monetized that?
https://www.itjungle.com/2017/01/23/drilling-ibms-system-gro... this tells you how IBM is making money: one half is from database, data warehousing, data analytics, and transaction processing software (with a very healthy 32% profit ratio), another half is from services & cloud and then -- because I was cheating and both halves are a bit less than 50% actually -- you have financing contributing more than 10% (47% profit...) to the middle line and finally hardware contributing 6% (and less than 12% profit).
Well, in terms of high performance computing, IBM makes the BlueGene series of supercomputers. These computers currently occupy the #4 and #9 on the Top500…
4, 9, 19, 21, 56, 68, 99 and 100 from the top 100 of the list.
Since at least 1997 IBM has been the top recipient of patents every year, and has had the most patents for 24 consecutive years. They are into basic research from everything from chip design to brain research and quantum computing.
Recently they've been diving head first into public & especially private clouds. They do a lot in the analytics services areas. And of course - huge enterprise support contracts.