not so random musings and mutterings about high performance computing, business, entrepreneurship, and the economy
Surface computing. I can see uses for this, in HPC and analytics, not to mention tele/remote medicine, science/engineering … Kudos to Microsoft. This should be quite cool.
still not behaving with Ubuntu 7.04 or 6.10. In 6.10, at least it gets the nfs-premount scripts, and then tries (and fails, due to a missing colon) the /root directory from the NFS server. Reminds me of the autoinst days of long past. Took a while to figure out how to get Irix booted diskless, … Read morediskless …
Our systems install via PXE boot whenever possible. Much faster than DVD/CD, floppies and alike. I have been fighting with PXELINUX (part of the excellent SYSLINUX package of boot loaders with menus) trying to get it working the way I want it to. This is important for JackRabbit and our compute clusters.
Read morePXE Boot OS and configuration
A point I try to make to customers at the day job is that, as you scale up a systems size, your design will need to scale as well. And this begs the question. How will it need to change?
Ok, it hit me today. I know what I want, or at least in part, in a language. I do not want to write loops. I want to write something like this:
Michael Suess over at the always interesting Thinking Parallel blog wrote a number of interesting pieces recently. I would suggest a trip over there to read some of them. I must thank him at some point for pointing to us as part of his “you are what you read” post. We aren’t on an anti-Microsoft spree, and I am not trying to “kill” them. I am being skeptical about their motives, and noting that there are alternative and simpler explanations for their actions. Unfortunately, Microsoft has managed to offend quite a few practitioners of HPC with their “now its mainstream” marketing message, and their recent faux-paux with patent FUD, claiming that users of Linux were effectively IP thieves.
Read moreNail, hammer, hit hit hit …
This is not about HPC.
I look at our logs every now and then to see if we have problems which aren’t normally covered in monitoring scenarios. Looking over the web logs, I see the usual usage, and bots. Some bots have been poorly behaved, some are quite intelligent.
Google’s are pretty good.
Read moreIll-behaved web-crawlers
From John West’s InsideHPC blog I found a link to a link to a paper on a Microsoft site. This paper starts out with lofty goals
Read moreAhhh … the business rationale becomes clear …
The Register reports that Microsoft is
too busy to name Linux patents
uh… yeah.
This whole thing bothers me. Because it means that Microsoft is implying that anyone in HPC using Linux is a thief, stealing and using Microsoft intellectual property without paying Microsoft for the privilege. Neat strategy. “Use our stuff and we won’t sue”.
Read moreThe story that will not go away
I like the intel compilers. The generate nice code on intel platforms. The problem is when you use them for your product, you only get good code for intel platforms. The resulting code winds up being slow in many cases on Opterons. Which is not good.