Scalability.org

ROCm 7 fix for rocm-core on linux mint

So ROCm 7 just dropped and I encountered a bug on my linux mint machines. The short version is that the postinst script has == rather than =~ comparisons, which fail for linux mint, but pass for Ubuntu. Fixing this was easy, and I sent a diff to Anush E and a

A tale, told by a fool, full of sound and fury, signifying safe data ...

About two weeks ago, I noticed that my DNS was slow and this didn't make sense to me. DNS for me runs on two VMs, on two different machines. If one is down, the other (easily) handles the load. It just couldn't have been DNS that

Stateful vs Stateless systems

Long ago, back when we banged desktop/deskside computers together for HPC clusters, I was a firm believer in stateful systems. That is, systems with an OS installed directly on the unit, where you had to manage configuration, and configuration drift. Many different tools were developed for this. CFEngine, puppet,

My first #SciFi publication

See https://a.co/d/dAF9dxD , in the kindle store. After getting a third rejection of this story, despite very positive reviews from my local writers group, and a writers conference I attended last year, I figured I didn't really need to sell the story to a publication.

Kindertransport and echos from terrible past times

I just returned from Hamburg Germany after attending ISC24. Hamburg is a beautiful city. The people are wonderful, and they even tolerated my rather terrible Deutsch Sprache. When I visited Vienna about 17 years ago, the people would immediately switch to English once they heard me speak. Go figure. ISC24

A workaround for a problem

My primary test systems are Debian based. One of them hosts an AMD MI50 Instinct GPU that I use for dev/test/learning. I install various ROCm on this system. One of the packages to be installed is rocm-gdb. This is the GPU code debugger tool. This package has a

The banality of evil, or FAFO

This past weekend, 7-October-2023 until this writing on 9-October-2023, has seen a horrific pogrom perpetrated against Israelis by a terrorist organization, Hamas. During the pogrom, we saw images of people celebrating the events. Celebrating murder and mayhem. Celebrating rape, decapitation, torture. Celebrating killing families. Sweets were handed out. Joyful singing

Shuffling machines

Given that I am starting a new position tomorrow, I wanted to build a new deskside machine to use. One of my older cluster machines died a few weeks ago, and I needed to replace it. My deskside machine at the time, was an AMD Epyc Rome unit with 16

Joining AMD

I've accepted an offer from AMD for a Principal Member of Technical Staff position as Principal Customer Engineer for Instinct GPU Software. I can't say much about the role at the moment, though I am looking forward to the challenge. For those who have read this

Risks and opportunity costs

The context of this post is about an important decision, at which company I am going to work, that I am finalizing now. Every single decision you make between such scenarios carries a risk. You can't eliminate risk. You can, to some degree mitigate it by chosing carefully.

Yarhzeit

It's been a year since he crossed the rainbow bridge. I say good morning to his ashes every day. It's still hard. According to tradition, at the end of the 1 year morning period After the year-long mourning period ends and the Kaddish experience recedes, the

A rubicon has been crossed

I have submitted, after editing/formatting/reviewing, my first SciFi short story for consideration of publication. The next (about) 180 days of waiting for the response, be it negative (19/20 odds) or positive (1/20 odds), are going to be ... interesting. In the mean time ... I have a position

Tooling/stack matters

As I continue to explore the landscape of options for my next job, I've been having conversations with many people about their needs/wants/think-they-need issues. What is curious to me are the similarities across organizations for solving the same sorts of problems, with tooling that really doesn&

Technical debt

Waaaay back in graduate school towards the end of my research first days, my father sent me a copy of "The Unix Haters Handbook". It was a mostly humorous compilation of complaints about unix in general. I enjoyed the book. A story within it had to do with

@HPCpodcast talking about Linux wars

I joined Shahin Khan of OrionX and Doug Black of InsideHPC to talk about the kerfuffle around Red Hat/IBM's decision to close off access to sources (behind a paywall with additional distributi.on restrictions), and what this could mean to the ecosystem. It was a great conversation,

Pain is a powerful teacher

I have spinal stenosis. Which resulted in a sciatica like pain down my left leg. It got bad enough that I could no longer walk appreciable distances without significant pain meds, and rest. I'd even ordered, and used on occasion, a cane to help me walk. I scheduled

Red Hat, rebuilders, and paths forward for HPC

Red Hat has decided to change the way it handles its source distribution for its enterprise products. This change impacts downstream rebuilders, such as Alma and Rocky Linux. Not to mention Oracle. This change has potentially very large implications down the line. I'll get to this later. Red

All good things ...

June 1st was my last day at Jump Trading. I spent lots of time writing code in Python, Julia, and some C++. I worked with massive data sets. I built (testable) models of things. It was a mixture of a research and software development position. I enjoyed it, and the

Implications of runs on banks

So yeah, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) had a run last week. Over the weekend various (self interested) people posted takes that ranged between pleading for bailouts, begging FDIC/Fed/Treasury to do things, all the way through people (without obvious self interest) who seem to know and understand the processes

State of AMD's ROCm

TL;DR version: partially working on my laptop, compared with CUDA, which just works. On the same machine. I have a $work machine with some nice AMD MIXXX kit, but I'm talking about the laptop I am typeing this on. This is an AMD Omen 2020, with 64

Real science does not care about your narrative

In the soviet union, early in the 20th century. a political narrative was born. In it a pseudo-scientist, really, an activist, named Trofim Lysenko decided that it was politically incorrect to study or apply genetics. He insisted that Lamarckism was the proper, politically correct theory. And thus a narrative was

Relearning Maxima (Macsyma)

In undergrad (Stony Brook), I had a math teacher (numerical methods class) who talked about this package he used in his research. Macsyma was a symbolic math package, sometimes called a computer algebra tool. Of course, seeing the likely utility of this in some of my courses (I am still

Backing up decades of data

This is a tale of backing up data. To date, I have a small-ish 28TB server at home running zfs (finally) on debian 11.5. This is my local backup target, and I take snapshots of my other systems over to it. Most of my other systems have 1-2TB of

On medical device company and insurance complex (in the US)

I use a CPAP machine. I've had one for, I dunno, 12 years? It started out being owned by a company that leased it to my insurance company. Monthly. For most of the first 8 years. Then that machine started dying, and as I found out, the medical

Annoying people

You know, those idiots who take 2 parking slots. Or in this case, idiots in the (small) gym that insist they are using 2 machines at once. Not letting other people use them. And these are 2 of the more popular free weight stations: a Smith machine, and a dead