IBM recently announced that they will acquire Red Hat for $34 billion. This is IBM's biggest acquisition ever. This will have a strong effect on the future development of HPC in the cloud. The very quick developments of public cloud and container services like AWS (Amazon Web Services), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform has forced IBM to do something to remain an important player in this quickly growing area. Buying Red Hat will quickly make IBM a front-runner in the technologies used to run these public cloud platforms.

Over the last couple of years we have seen more and more CFD-related services run on Cloud platforms like AWS and Azure. All supercomputers on the Top500 list run Linux, and both IBM and Red Hat have worked on HPC related technologies for a long time. Red Hat will now most likely become a division under IBM's Hybrid Cloud Unit. IBM has proved to be quite successful in handling open-source projects, hopefully they will allow Red Hat to grow and continue to develop Linux and cloud and container functionality under open-source... interesting times ahead.