not so random musings and mutterings about high performance computing, business, entrepreneurship, and the economy
I have been touching on some of the aspects of this in various posts here recently. Basically you have 2 roughly related technologies to work with today. Shared memory (OpenMP) and distributed memory (MPI). Sure there are others, but these dominate.
But there is a problem with these.
Read moreHow do you program N cores (as N -> infinity)
What a day for 10GbE. Ask a question. Get a few answers. Inexpensive NICs are good. So are inexpensive switches. Have a look at Woven systems.
I asked earlier today where the 10GbE was, noting that NICs were horribly expensive, and switches were bad as well. Well, I just read this which suggests the Mellanox will be sourcing chips to builders for reasonable pricing. Now only if CX-4 weren’t so expensive …
Over at Digital Tipping Point we see something quite interesting. The blog author has set up a list for people to sign up to be sued by Microsoft for patent infringement.
Now you might think I mean “backfire” as in these people are nuts. This is not what I mean.
Read moreCan you say … "backfire" ?
For quite a while, we have been hearing about how great 10GbE is. I like the idea, it is just ethernet. Plug it in (with CX-4 … ) and off you go.
Read moreWherefore art thou, 10GbE?
Loaded it on two “desktop” systems for a customer evaluation. Well these are desktops in name only. Smaller than the other ferocious beasts we finished building last week, but still …
Lots of people called this for what it was. FUD. Pure and simple. Marketing by threatened litigation.
This evening, information-week posted more discussion, including Linus Torvalds viewpoint. Not so oddly enough, his view was quite similar with my thoughts.
That wasn’t what struck me. It was the backpedaling.
Read moreOpting for the sane strategy
Well, we seem to not have been the only ones to notice the problems with the arguments made by Microsoft legal. Larry Augustin, of VA Linux fame, wrote a response that is worth reading. In it he basically says “put them up (the allegedly infringed patents, and where the infringing code/design is), or shut up.” The critical “money” quote is
Here we are in the age of the cluster and grid, with distributed shared nothing approaches to processing cycles, and we collectively have this rather ironic fixation on shared file systems. This is amusing as one of the critical arguments for distributed computing is that, in aggregate, N processors provides N times the number of processing cycles that 1 processor can provide, and shared resources are contended for resources (e.g. bottlenecks).
Read moreLocality and centrality in massive computing and storage systems
What do you do when a competitor encroaches upon your cash cows, starts usurping deals, demonstrates unbeatable TCO, infinitely better acquisition cost, better security and resilience to attacks? You FUD them of course. FUD being the act of creating Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt about them. Say, for example, dangling the possibility of lawsuits against users of the competitors products. Scare your customers, scare their customers.
Read moreIf your competitor beats you in the marketplace, then FUD, FUD, FUD