Looking forward to the HPC Linux on Wall Street conference

Will be there with a new siFlash unit. Uses some new Flash and SSD devices. Should be able to talk about that soon. Whats cool is this is our chassis. Not a COTS chassis from one of the larger vendors. This is a new chassis we worked on designing with the ODM. The unit is a prototype, and sadly the motherboard we will use for this isn’t quite in full production yet, so we are using a stand in. And our CPUs are older engineering samples … hopefully the newer versions will arrive before Friday, maybe not. And its only 1/2 full of disks. Lots of interesting things to work around. But the concept of what we are doing with this, and where we are going with it should be obvious to those who see it. Performance matters, and performance follows good design. Maintainability matters. And airflow/cooling matters. And modular design matters (one base chassis, flexibility in the optional components … lots of reusability). Its a prototype, not final metal. But its ours. Because the COTS chassis on the market all have (annoying) quirks, that in some cases render them unsuitable for the tasks they are given. We think this system is going to turn heads in the disk/flash/ssd array market. Not just the chassis, but the whole underlying system. The second chassis we are working on should turn even more heads. Customers we’ve hinted at this new design are openly telling us they want to see it soon. Basically, we want to make sure we can reduce cost, weight, increase airflow and performance, increase maintainability, decrease maint pain. Oh, and did I mention … it should be denser and faster than other stuff on the market? I won’t quote speeds and feeds until I have had a chance to measure it. On the sub-optimal disk configs I have in the prototype I am bringing, with a half compliment of SSDs, I hit a sustained 3.7 GB/s write and a 4.6 GB/s read. Sadly, we didn’t have enough SSDs for a full population of drives. As I said, this system should turn some heads. Even with all the half complete, sub-optimal bits we’ve had to do to bring it in some form to the show, yeah, it should turn some heads.