cloud

What is old, is new again

Way back in the pre-history of the internet (really DARPA-net/BITNET days), while dinosaur programming languages frolicked freely on servers with “modern” programming systems and data sets, there was a push to go from a static linking programs to a more modular dynamic linking. The thought processes were that it would save precious memory, not having … Read moreWhat is old, is new again

Fully RAMdisk booted CentOS 7.2 based SIOS image for #HPC , #bigdata , #storage etc.

This is something we’ve been working on for a while … a completely clean, as baseline a distro as possible, version of our SIOS RAMdisk image using CentOS (and by extension, Red Hat … just need to point to those repositories). And its available to pull down and use as you wish from our download … Read moreFully RAMdisk booted CentOS 7.2 based SIOS image for #HPC , #bigdata , #storage etc.

Raw Unapologetic Firepower: kdb+ from @Kx

While the day job builds (hyperconverged) appliances for big data analytics and storage, our partners build the tools that enable users to work easily with astounding quantities of data, and do so very rapidly, and without a great deal of code. I’ve always been amazed at the raw power in this tool. Think of a … Read moreRaw Unapologetic Firepower: kdb+ from @Kx

When infinite resources aren't, and why software assumes they are infinite

We’ve got customers with very large resource machines. And software that sees all those resources and goes “gimme!!!!”. So people run. And then more people use it. And more runs. Until the resources are exhausted. And hilarity (of the bad kind) ensues. These are firedrills. I get an open ticket that “there must be something … Read moreWhen infinite resources aren't, and why software assumes they are infinite

"Unexpected" cloud storage retrieval charges, or "RTFM"

An article appeared on HN this morning. In it, the author noted that all was not well with the universe, as their backup, using Amazon’s Glacier product, wound up being quite expensive for a small backup/restore. The OP discovered some of the issues with Glacier when they began the restore (not commenting on performance, merely … Read more"Unexpected" cloud storage retrieval charges, or "RTFM"

There are no silver bullets, 2015 edition

In Feb 2013, I opined (with some measure of disgust) that people were looking at various software packages as silver bullets, these magical bits of a stack which could suddenly transform massive steaming piles of bits (big … uh … “data” ?) into golden nuggets of actionable data. Many of the “solutions” marketed these days … Read moreThere are no silver bullets, 2015 edition

Updated net-tools bits

So far, 3 components, and working to fix a few things in formatting. On github, grab it here. First, lsbond.pl to report about bond details root@unison-mgr-1:~/net-tools# ./lsbond.pl bond0: mac 0c:c4:7a:48:69:cb state up mode fault-tolerance (active-backup) xmit_hash layer2 0 active slave eth1 polling 100 ms up_delay 200 ms down_delay 200 ms slave nics: eth1: mac 0c:c4:7a:48:69:cb, … Read moreUpdated net-tools bits

The worlds fastest hyper-converged appliance is faster and more affordable than ever

This is a very exciting hyper-converged system, representing our next generation of time series, and big data analytical systems. Tremendous internal bandwidths coupled with massive internal parallelism, and minimal latency design on networks. This unit has been designed to focus upon delivering the maximal performance possible in an as minimal footprint … both rack based … Read moreThe worlds fastest hyper-converged appliance is faster and more affordable than ever

Real measurement is hard

I had hinted at this last week, so I figure I better finish working on this and get it posted already. The previous bit with language choice wakeup was about the cost of Foreign Function Interfaces, and how well they were implemented. For many years I had honestly not looked as closely at Python as I should have. I’ve done some work in it, but Perl has been my go-to language. For me, the brevity of the interface, the ease of use of the FFI in it was what made me rethink some things.
I look at languages as tools to an end, a way to implement an algorithm, which will not always be expressed in the same language. I’ve been doing one manner or the other of FFI (not called that back then) since the mid to late 1980s. Usually Fortran and C, but as often as not, Assembler, Basic, Fortran, C, etc. One of the first codes I wrote for hire in 1984 was a terminate and stay resident driver for an experiment control card. Main code was in basic (I kid you not), and I exposed interrupt service routines to handle control functions. It was a fun thing to do, and later the experiment became famous. Regardless of that, the ability to understand where code was spending its time, and what it was doing became very tightly ingrained in me from that experience. Not that basic was fast … it wasn’t. I had to do all the hard/fast stuff in assembler. If you didn’t understand your code, chances are your measurements of the code, and your ability to effect changes would be … limited.
I look at rapid development languages (Perl, Python, etc.) as being high level mechanisms to bridge a variety of “fast” lower level bits (libraries, etc.) together. These tools often have good internal support for things that I frankly really don’t want to waste my time implementing.

Read moreReal measurement is hard