for our little conejo (L. Flavigularis).
Create a 128 GB file. Filled with zeros.
Read moreYet another not so useful test, learning more things about Linux IO
not so random musings and mutterings about high performance computing, business, entrepreneurship, and the economy
Some of my collaborators should have a very interesting announcement about an accelerated life science application coming out soon. Stay tuned…
for our little conejo (L. Flavigularis).
Create a 128 GB file. Filled with zeros.
Read moreYet another not so useful test, learning more things about Linux IO
Our little L. Flavigularis is shaping up nicely. IOzone tests are, well, quite respectable (bug me at SC06 about this if you are interested). I expect to see some serious FUD from competitors, especially if they get a look at the numbers. And that concerns me, as I am not at all convinced that IOzone and its ilk represent real measurements of meaningful items. I have a strong sense of a “herd” mentality/effect. That is, this is what everyone has been using, so we need to keep using it. No matter how good (or bad) it may be at characterizing our workload. Just like HPL/HPCC. They mean exactly what to HMMer users and BLAST users? IOzone isn’t bad, I just don’t grasp its relationship to real workloads. HPL/HPCC is completely irrelevant to informatics workloads. I wouldn’t build/architect an HPC solution for informatics based upon HPL scores, and nor would most of the other systems designers I know and have worked with. HPL is great at predicting HPL performance. How it does on workload performance is a whole other question.
Read moreMaximizing the minimum performance
We took L. Flavigularis out to to a test track in a manner of speaking. IOzone to be specific. We cracked the throttle a bit. Not flat out. Just a speed trial.
Read moreL. Flavigularis update
We have a machine we are building in the lab now. I am running all sorts of code on it. My impressions?
Read moreInitial impressions of Socket F/1207 machine
Taking our little L. flavigularis for a few tests. Its motherboard needs the 2.6.17 and above kernels. Used Ubuntu Edgy Eft (6.10) for it. Even had the latest version of the drivers we needed built in. Install was easy. The specs on the unit are incredible (initial performance data below). Built the disk arrays (ok, started the build, it takes a while). 26TB RAID6 usable before formatting. Cool. 25TB after formatting.
root@xxxxxxx:~# df -h /big Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/yyy 25T 544K 25T 1% /big
But just how fast is our little L. flavigularis?
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Read moreWindsprints with L. flavigularis
So we have had a woodcrest in house for a while now. When we have time we beat on it, we ran codes on it. My impressions are now well formed, and I understand where it makes sense as a platform, and where the competitive technologies make sense. This is not from marketing documents, but from real world testing.
Read moreWoodcrest update, day N+1