scalability.org

Chapter 11 filing today. Seems that the administration is thinking this will be a fast process.

I think the creditors think otherwise.

Chrysler may be worth more to them in a Chapter 7 liquidation than a Chapter 11 and section 363 scenario.

What does this mean to HPC? Potentially lots. Chrysler, and all of its suppliers and partners use quite a bit of HPC. Keeps costs down. If they emerge, I expect them to use even more HPC. If they don’t, and there is no guarantee that they will, then there will likely be a liquidation of assets, including their HPC assets.

This isn’t going to be pretty, or quick. Anyone thinking otherwise is fooling themselves.

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I hit Ctrl-C while testing …

the streaming write
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This one has a nice top output …
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Found this, this morning. As the US and the rest of the world take defibrillator paddles to the economy, and we hear mutterings of class warfare, it is interesting to hear similar sentiments expressed … globally … by the people doing the actual job creating.

This link is the full story.

Good read. I don’t have the nice car (I have a 13 year old Jeep), or the huge house. Still in growth mode. But the “no off button”? Yeah, I have that. I’d love nothing more than to plow all the money we have to pay the state and federal government each year, back into hiring people. Can’t do that though.

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Nope, haven’t been acquired. There is a lot of that going around though (and in some cases, rollups can do good in this market).

We are now officially a Cray CX1 reseller (woot!!!)

Since my SGI days, I’ve really enjoyed working with my Crayon colleagues. The funny thing is that many of the faces are the same.

CX1 is a neat product, fits in well with what lots of our customers are doing. JackRabbit fits nicely next to CX1, and can talk to it over GbE, 10GbE, IB, …

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Yowza …

[root@dv3-of coreutils-7.2]# /opt/scalable/bin/dd if=/mnt/data/filesys1/xfs/t/big.file of=/dev/null bs=16M iflag=direct
807+0 records in
807+0 records out
13539213312 bytes (14 GB) copied, 13.2268 s, 1.0 GB/s

Unit has 8 GB ram.
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AMCC looks like they sold their 3ware raid bits to LSI on the 21st of April.

3ware is one of the major lower end RAID suppliers out there. They have a volume business, but like everyone, I suspect AMCC was falling on hard times, and needed to monetize its purchase of 3ware.

What does this mean? Probably more consolidation in the storage market. 3ware built its own storage processors. LSI makes storage processors. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the 3ware brand continued to some level, but with LSI chips going forward.

Or LSI could simply close them down, take out a competitor at the low end. I think the LSI Megaraid folks have somewhat similar performance to the 3ware cards. But between the two, the 3ware folks have a far better interface with Linux … LSI’s drivers in the kernel are severely outdated, and (sadly) they show no signs of fixing this situation.

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I have been quite critical of rPath. I believe rightly so. They make life far too hard for people who need to build code or kernel modules to live patch a system. The documentation for doing this stuff … really doesn’t exist. You are frankly, on your own.

So I have spent hours trying to figure this out. And finally, came across the method to get builds to work.
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So I was thinking about how to work around the issues I found in OpenFiler. Basically the inability to upgrade drivers is the critical issue.

Well, if OpenFiler never touches the hardware, this is much less of an issue.

Bear with me.

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I need to get this out first and foremost. I do believe that cloud computing or similar is inevitable. It is coming.

I am also a realist. I know perfectly well that there are some fairly significant impediments to it.

The impediments are a mixture of technological deployment, and business models. Its not impossible to do this given sufficient money. But some of the dependencies are simply too pricey to enable rapid cloud adoption, and I don’t see this changing rapidly in the near term (next 3 years).

Ok … this is the short version of things. I can go into it in much greater depth, and I may. But not now.

HPCwire reports on some work going on to use the cloud. There are some very very important messages in there for potential cloud users, something the hype has largely covered (and something we worry about all the time).

Data motion. Or more precisely, the time and monetary cost of data motion.
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