As it turns out, a good friend was on that Northwest flight. I won’t identify him (though I know he reads this blog occasionally). What happened to him has made me think of my own responses in such a scenario. But it has also made me question the TSA’s kneejerk ineffective new guidelines. Especially in […]
A quick and dirty test on a JackRabbit Flash machine. This is a machine going to a proof of concept project soon. A simple 8k random read against 256GB data spread out over 4 volumes. 1 machine. 48GB ram. Open up the throttle on the stock config. Engines aren’t running at full speed, but its […]
Sometimes … sometimes … helpful utilities are helpful. Like installation systems that present the raw hardware with drivers to me, and let ME decide what I want to do with them. Unfortunately … I often run head first into bad choices made by the installer coders or architects. Dm-raid is one of these cases. It […]
I did a few interviews, ranging from bloggers through journalists. This interview is one of the mix. By all means, please do go to their site and see it, and their text around it. I had much more to say, this is an edited down version. Basically I ran the Kx kdb+ demo, the dd […]
Sage Weil has posted on this. Ceph is distributed file system, with an MDS, and a few other things, that looks quite interesting. Not necessarily on the high performance side, but on the simple object storage side. The client going in to 2.6.33 could be quite interesting. Pay attention to Ceph. Think of Lustre, without […]
This is related to an issue we ran in to, today, and several other times. It sounds strange, but if you maintain rigid control over a huge swath of your stack, you run a fairly serious risk of being unable to respond to changing environments as quickly as your competition. The law of un-intended consequences […]
We had a bunch of parts overnighted so we could start building some machines. Turns out one critical part for mounting the heat sinks was missing. If that part doesn’t arrive tomorrow, we’ll have to do a work around near term, and worst case, use a slightly different MB/mount for this, as we have that […]
XKCD comic from a few days ago .. reminds me of the spherical horse joke I used to tell … For those not in the know, physicists like to reduce complex problems to simpler problems, solve the simpler problem … so when designing a faster race-horse, why not make the horse spherical rather than its […]
I had a chance to look at the perl 6 advent calendar. What caught my eye was yesterdays post. In it, meta operators are explained. So here is a common HPC pattern, a reduction operation. Say a sum reduction. Suppose you want to sum up the values in some vector A. In Perl, A would […]
See the day job site for details soon (next week?) for the posting. Viewed 12071 times by 2751 viewers