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Two senior execs exit Yahoo!

YAHOO! on Friday confirmed that its senior vice president of marketing and the head of its business services division have both resigned. The portal company said John Costello, its head marketer, will leave to become chief marketing officer at retailing giant Home Depot. Costello will exit Yahoo just shy of his one-year anniversary with the company. His hiring was highly publicized by Yahoo as he brought with him a pedigree in the non-Internet world as a former marketing executive at Sears Roebuck.

Yahoo has retained executive placement firm Spencer Stuart to begin its search to fill Costello’s vacancy. Yahoo spokeswoman Nicki Dugan said the search was at an “early stage.” In the meantime, people once reporting to Costello will report to Chief Operating Officer Dan Rosensweig.

The company also confirmed that Jim Fanella, senior vice president of its business services unit, will resign from his position for personal reasons. Steve Boom, who formerly headed the division’s European operations, will be promoted to Fanella’s old job.

Linux company plans German lab

LINUX NetworX, which sells supercomputers made by connecting numerous small Linux systems, has begun a partnership with the Fraunhofer Institute to develop new technology and increase its European presence.

Linux NetworX, based in Salt Lake City, counts among its customers several national laboratories, genetics research company Sequenom, Motorola and Boeing. The Fraunhofer Institute employs 110 scientists to work on mathematics with commercial applications, best known in the Internet realm for its patents in MP3 digital audio encoding.

Under the partnership, Linux NetworX and the institute will jointly research technologies for linking Linux systems into a supercomputer “cluster.” In addition, the center will help the company support European customers such as the Netherlands branch of Shell Oil or the Boehringer Ingelheim pharmaceutical company in Germany. The code would run with the permission level of the local user.

Cluster supercomputers--often running Linux, sometimes its progenitor Unix and occasionally Windows--are becoming increasingly popular as an economical alternative in some cases to traditional supercomputers. One of the challenges of clustered supercomputers, though, is revamping a computer program written for a single computer so that it runs across a group of computers. Linux NetworX and the Fraunhofer Institute will pool their research for this task, among others, the organizations said.

Intellectual property generated by the partnership will be jointly owned by both organizations, Rutledge said. Linux NetworX will have a small staff in Germany, but plans to expand it.

Mainstream companies pushing Linux clusters for supercomputing include IBM, Dell Computer and Hewlett-Packard.

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