Few details. My wife heard a report from an eye-witness to it. Nothing concrete yet, nothing I can definitively report. What was told to me was that the incident was in the concourse, security tried to apprehend someone, and they were eventually walked out. I also heard something about a police officer carrying something “with wires hanging out”.
Hopefully we will hear something soon.
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Our webstore has been a good thing for us to implement, it has driven purchases (more indirectly than directly). But it is somewhat hard to maintain, and causes significant issues when we want to update it. Moreover, its not sufficiently flexible that people can configure specific systems on it, such as siCluster.
So we are revamping it. Rethinking some of the basic bits. Hopefully these bits of re-thinking will result in a better experience for everyone.
More soon.
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I’ll have the full set of numbers soon from the tests our customer was running on their shiny new JR4 (they agreed to let us talk about them). One of the more interesting take-aways is that the 24 drive unit appears to provide something a bit north of 5000 IOPs in a number of the random tests, doing seeks on files larger than ram. I need to think this through somewhat.
Anyone can create files in an effectively large ram cache and seek with minimal latency, getting great IOPs numbers. Once you get out of cache, your performance generally craters.
I need to run a more extended set of tests, so that I understand this better. If you look at many benchmark reports, they happily report tests using IOzone and other codes that are completely containable within the system memory … so there is very little actual IO, until after the test is over. This has been one of my central criticisms of such testing. Moreover these tests rarely, if ever, map into real world scenarios and use cases. I hear arguments indicating it is better to use something than nothing, but I don’t think I agree with this view. I’d rather use something that had a sound basis behind it, than a questionable metric of dubious value.
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No … seriously. I solved 2 long standing issues today, one for an internal system now running 12 cores and 32 GB ram (needed a bios update), and the other was fixing the ()*&*&%%$^%(*& problems with a set of GA180 cards.
I dunno, I think the issue is that I have ample time to think without interruption. The family is off swimming (wish I were with them), but getting this done is important.
Next on my agenda is figuring out how to boot Solaris/OpenSolaris from Linux pxelinux. The motherboard doesn’t have IDE connectors, and doesn’t seem to like the SATA DVD, or the USB DVD for booting (grrrr). PXE booting works fine, but, as with all other things about Solaris, their stuff doesn’t quite work the same. So we need some sort of intermediate step between pxeboot environment and their tools. Reading up on multiboot.
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List of things they changed is long. Some major ones … some … I dunno … bad ideas mebbe? like Grub2? Like incompatibilities with various motherboards (struggling with this right now on a home machine rebuild). Like unchangable login windows, and crappy icons for power, mail, volume, unchangable options in gnome … the xorg config debacle.
I could go on. The big one is the nVidia issue. Install restricted drivers. Sure. No problem. Then reboot and … No display. Its gone. Kaput.
This release is better called “our way or the highway”.
Well, its not hard to figure out what to do next (as he watches FC12 hit the 11% download mark). Gonna re-look at Debian as well. Ubuntu 8.04 was pretty good. 8.10 started disappointing, 9.04 was a significant disappointment, and 9.10 was a mistake.
This is ridiculous. Can’t anyone put together a half decent desktop Linux distribution, and not go off into directions they really shouldn’t? Not looking for a distro war … just blown away by how bad this stuff is.
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Weофис обзавеждане are developing some marketing materials and pages for our siCluster systems. Also some new internal benchmark reports on JackRabbit, DeltaV, and other tools.
Also, we have some contracts we are working on to supply some new benchmarks of some announced/delivered and announced/not-currently shipping chips. Have a variety of new things showing up in the lab … would love to have the time to play with them … will start our automated testing bits for now. We have a short leash on one of the boxen we need to get done with it soon.
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We are often asked what differentiates us from our competition. One of the more important aspects is our raw uncompromising performance. Our systems are fast. Not in a marketing number sense (I’ll get to this in a minute). But in real application fast. We take a no holds barred approach to performance design. And our customers do see this.
Design, implementation, … these are critical elements. Software stack, tuning …. these are critical. Performance density … how much performance you can squeeze in per rack unit, is getting to be just as important as capacity density … how much storage you can squeeze in per dollar.
And this gets to a definition of what I call a “marketing number” or “marketing benchmarks”. A marketing benchmark is a number whose derivation is in terms of optimal theoretical conditions, with assumptions that are rarely if ever true in the real world, often using unrealistic configurations for end users.
That is, marketing uses their marketing numbers to make (often specious) claims on performance density and raw performance. Its a shame that they are not meaningful. Every time you pick up a component of some system, you see these numbers. For example, did you know all SATA run at 3Gb/s? My gosh … they are fast !!! 375 MB/s that is …
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please do bear with me.
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It does seem that Larry Ellison and his team are focused where they think Sun’s real value lies. From an article today in The Register, some of these plans are showing up in the press. For those not sure if things are done with, the JAVA symbol appear to be going going … gone. You can still find a few reminents here. And one of its last 10Q filings, here.
As I noted previously, Oracle isn’t dumb. The execs aren’t dumb. They will focus where they can add value and extract profitable revenue. This has some implications for HPC, but more in a moment:
What Oracle seems intent on doing is ramping up the Sun direct sales, going after the top 4,000 accounts in the world with a vengeance. Even more importantly, it wants to do so with an integrated set of systems, from the microprocessor chip all the way up to industry-specific applications.
Oracle will also shut down businesses that Sun has been pursuing that do not make money, according to the reports. That could include backtracking on low-end x64-based servers, but not Sparc-based machinery, which will get a boost.
Yeah, that about covers it. How much money does Sun make from HPC?
Probably not very much.
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We get RFPs all the time. Some of these RFPs are genuine “show us good things so we can consider them.” Many are “we really want to buy something quite specific, but the rules won’t let us specify then.”
Some of them have requirements or limits that make me think of a kid saying … “and I want a pony too”.
Such RFPs usually have a combination of reasonable sounding elements, right up to the point where they demand the pony.
The pony is a point of exasperation. A point at which you have to wonder if the people who put the pony request in are being serious in their request. Honoring the request for the pony could be anything from simply arduous, to outright painful. A pony represents a fundamentally incorrect assumption and set of expectations on the part of the RFP issuer. It costs time/effort/resources to correct these expectations, and if you can’t get them to reconsider the pony … to adjust their expectations to be more in line with reality … it might be better to walk away.
So maybe this is how we need to grade RFPs. Spot the ponies, count them, and if they exceed our threshold of pony acceptance, ditch the RFP.
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