When you’ve lost Jon Stewart …

Here in the US, we have a number of scandals brewing. Many of those for the party in control of the White House and the Senate would like to have you believe that these are in fact tempests in teapots. In this case, there are at least 2 Nixonian scandals going non-linear here, with a 3rd trying to break through. The political left is doing all it can to wave off one of them, though this is getting progressively harder by the day as more information comes out.

And very sadly for the left, the worst fears on the right that they have been targeted by government, that the left has labeled conspiracy theories in the past, are coming out with substantial supporting evidence.

So much so that hard core, in the tank “journalists” (scare quotes intentional) are abandoning this administration’s fold as their propaganda mouthpieces. The spin is no longer working and they are spinning hard, as evidence mounts that the worst fears on the right were, in fact, the least of their worries.

A centerpiece of this administration has been the … er … unexamined … buy in from media and celebrity types. Most were strongly in the tank for this administration.

That buy in is now strongly on the wane, as these people are smart enough to recognize a sinking ship when they see one (buy maybe not smart enough to look skeptically and critically at those whom get their strong support, to determine if they are in fact worthy of such support).

One of those celebrity types is Jon Stewart, a reasonably funny comedian, with a talk show. He is unabashedly on the political left, and that’s fine. In this clip, apart from his mistake in dismissing the Benghazi scandal, he humorously gets to the heart of the matter.

When you’ve lost Jon Stewart …

[Update] We’ll the IRS (roughly akin to HMRC) scandal keeps growing worse by the hour. Original claim was a handful of cases. Then 10s. Then 75. Now its 500+. And growing. Anyone want to take a stab at the over-under for it getting to 5000+ in the next week?

Nixon was, unarguably, one of the most corrupt politicians to ever serve as CEO of our government. Each of the three scandals now growing daily (Benghazi, IRS, AP/”journo” spying w/o warrants) is making that minor break-in and cover-up look positively angelic in comparison.

[Update 2] Worser and worser. Not known for her deep thinking, Rep Michelle Bachmann nails what we have to worry about with the forthcoming Obamacare requirements and IRS involvement, regardless of our political pursuasion.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R., Minn.), a former IRS attorney, was even more explicit in her concerns.

?It?s very important to ask, and now it is reasonable to ask, could there potentially be political implications regarding health care?access to health care, denial of health care?will that happen based upon a person?s political beliefs or their religiously held beliefs?? Bachmann said.

?This question would?ve been considered unreasonable and out of bounds a week ago,? she noted. ?Today, this question is highly relevant.?

Those concerns could be heightened by allegations that the IRS illegally stole 60 million medical records from a health care facility in California in 2011.

If I were a seriously betting person, I’d say that this IRS scandal may be the thing that pushes congress to turn off Obamacare. How could any of them face their constituents knowing full well that random sections of them may be targeted for any reason. So far the targeting appears to have been political and religious. This is wrong, at all levels, independent of which political, or religious affiliation you happen to be.

[Update 3] Wow … just … Wow

I’d say this was Nixonian, but this one scandal is far worse than his petty lying. And its not even the worst of the scandals.

And the government knew about this before the election. And appears to have suppressed information.

Wow.

Presidents have resigned over less. And unlike Benghazi, no one died in the Watergate coverup. That one is getting worse by the minute as well.

Couple this to senators and congress critters from the ruling party asking for investigation of their perceived political enemies.

Yeah, this isn’t playing well on main street. It appears the MSM is still running interference for the ruling party, and failing, as the word is getting out, and people are pretty uniformly outraged over this.

Whether this gets to the point of the “I” word or not, I expect to see quite a few members of the admin brought up on charges of some sort or the other. I think its safe to say that after this, Obamacare surviving intact is going to be a stretch. Would you want the IRS deciding that you cannot get your medical care because they don’t like your political/religious/other views? Didn’t think so.

I wonder if the ruling party realizes how badly they just damaged themselves. Well, this does assume a competent opposition, which, from what I have seen, doesn’t quite exist. If they survive intact, its because the opposition is so idiotic. But thats a whole other conversation.

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What would you do if you had “infinite” bandwidth and IOPs coupled directly to your computing?

Imagine you have some … I dunno … gargantuan amount of bandwidth available, to and from your disks. And you have just positively insane IOP rates, at these very high bandwidths. And then you tightly couple a few hundred processor cores, and a few terabytes of memory.

What would you consider “gargantuan” bandwidth? What would you consider “insane” IOP rates?

And most importantly, if you had the type of IO fire power you considered gargantuan and insane, what would you do with this? Would this be a game changer for you (assuming you’ve succeeded in turning your computational bounded problems into IO problems following the sage wisdom of Seymour Cray)?

I’d love to hear what your scales are. I’ve heard many peoples’ scales to date in private conversation, but we’d love to hear what you consider “big”, “really big”, and “oh my gosh its coming this way” type of big.

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Don’t know if I mentioned it, but the day job has a new website

Take a gander.

Some things are missing, and our marketing folks are developing the content where needed, and revising it where we have existing content.

Its quite refreshing to see this. It will get better over time.

Its running in our facility now, and likely we’ll have a few clones in the cloud as well. But thats for later.

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Having fun writing a presentation about molecular dynamics and big data

Who’da ever thunk that MD simulations would start to become large enough to present IO and analysis problems?

Way way back when the digital supercomputing dinosaurs roamed the earth, looking for problems to crunch on, I simulated gallium arsenide on some of these machines.

I’d be lucky to get 100 time steps done, in a week, for 64 atoms. 64 atoms in double precision, with position, velocity, and atom type, lets be generous and call this 64 bytes in binary or 80 bytes, one terminal line, per atom in text. 64 atoms gave me less than 5kB/time step.

And yes, it really did take a week per 100 time steps back then. Newer hardware got this up to 5 minutes per time step. Ok, this was newer hardware in 1995. Your mileage may vary. Supercells in the mirror are larger than they appear.

And yes, the last time I ran the code on a laptop (6 or so years ago) it took … well … 10 seconds or so per time step.

But whats interesting to me today is that researchers are aiming for micro and millisecond simulations, with reasonable physics and chemistry theory levels (that is, not simply a baseline hard ball or Lennard-Jones potential, but something that could have realistic meaning). Which, if you are using time steps of order of 1 picosecond (10-12 seconds), means you have hundreds of millions of time steps to do. And lots of output to generate, and analyze.

This rapidly becomes a big data problem. Now take many of these simulations for large screening operations, and its a “oh my gosh its coming this way” data size problem. And no, this is not a cloud issue. Well outside of the realm of public clouds sweet spots.

Massive data needs massive firepower. Large scale simulation needs scalable storage and computing tightly coupled to it.

And I have to admit, I am having a great deal of fun looking up recent journal articles. I even cracked open my thesis and old writings. I was amused when I saw a journal article on something I had commented about informally about 8 years prior to that publication (and alluded to in my thesis). The wikipedia article on this phenomenon reads like the notes I had written on my observations.

Wild!

Well, back to the presentation. Its fun to (tangentially) work on science-like things again. I get to do too little of this. Though I have to be careful what I say, lest my wife think I want to go be a physics prof somewhere.

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Do we really have enough native STEM workers in the US?

Yes, actually we do. Too many.

Turns out that little law of supply and demand does in fact hold true. The higher the demand for something in limited supply, the higher the price (wages) you will pay for it.

By applying forces to this law, you impact a number of outcomes. That is, if you start monkeying around with the supply, sure, you can adjust the price you pay for the STEM. And, you get a whole host of other, well, I’ll call them unintended outcomes, by doing so.

Continue reading »

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Why I am taking a while to post the results

In short, I am trying to verify what we measured. Its repeatable, I’ve been measuring it for a week now, and having trouble with it, but I want to make absolutely sure I get this correct.

Because these are big numbers.

Very. Very. Big.

It would be annoying if I made a mistake. So I am double/triple/quadruple checking.

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Social Media Overload

Definition: When the amount of social media that everyone expects you to consume with a myriad of different, incompatible, and often annoying apps, absorbs so much of your time that your productivity drops … you decide that in the interests of your own personal sanity, you will spend more time with your family, your dog, and your friends, than dealing with {facebook,twitter,linkedin,RANDOM_SOCIAL_MEDIA_NAME} streams which steal time from the important things in life.

Honestly folks, how many social media sites can you belong to? Twitter, Facebook, tumbler, bumbler, thumbler, mumbler …

(and the irony of this is that I am typing this on a blog … I am aware of that irony … it is at least semi-humorous … and that it was rebroadcast on twitter makes it priceless).

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It must be some obscure law of nature

… whereby when I have the least time to spend on a particular task, there is an ordering of requests that I maximize the time spent on that task using the least efficient mechanisms possible.

Put another way, when I am busy, more people seek more of my time to handle things that I shouldn’t need to be involved in.

Or another way … simple things should be trivial, complex things possible, and yet the universe appears to arrange it self so that simple things become complex, and complex things become impossible.

Which I am fairly sure is somehow a restatement of the second law of thermodynamics in some form.

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Back with some benchmarks for siCloud

For the day job. They are … well … pretty nice.

What is siCloud you might ask? Well, think a very … very fast storage and computing cloud, leveraging many technologies we’ve developed.

You will be hearing more about this soon. And I’ll show some numbers and pictures in another post.

But before I get them up, anyone want to hazard a guess on the aggregate bandwidth and IOP rate for this system? Really … take a WAG at it.

Oh … I should note that we’ve got a new data collector framework coming together for these measurements, turns out we … er … overflowed some of the others. Darned 32 bit ints!

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Again, terribly busy

Have an order which is absorbing all of my cycles, and this is coupled with a nice springtime cold, and an elbow injury. Now if my dog bites me, my month will be complete.

Will start posting soon, once I get the the burn-in running. To give you a sense of the size of this order, we are installing additional power and AC capacity in our lab (its happening now). We just asked our landlord if they have a larger space in this complex (its built into our lease, as we weren’t sure of our growth rates), and they really don’t have anything we can use, so we might just suffer here for another year, and build up capacity in NJ.

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