Month: November 2006

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

landman@balto ~
$ ping jackrabbit
Read moreThe joy of (broken) DNS

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

Saw this on /. then followed it to the WSJ.. If this is real, then this is a good thing. SuSE is IMO one of the better distributions of Linux, certainly quite professional, and they use a modern kernel.

Read moreThis is a good thing, if it is real

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?
<big-evil-grin />

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