not so random musings and mutterings about high performance computing, business, entrepreneurship, and the economy
Hardware descriptions, results, musings, and discussions
Nice machine we have here … root@hermes:/data/tests# lspci | egrep -i ‘(AMD|NVidia)’ | grep VGA 3b:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GP100GL (rev a1) 88:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Vega 10 XTX [Radeon Vega Frontier Edition] I want to see how tensorflow and many others run on each of the cards. … Read moreWorking on benchmarking ML frameworks
This was making the rounds last week. Oracle seems to have a leak in its process, creating labels that trigger event notifications for people, for their packages. Solaris was decimated. More details at the links and at The Layoff. Honestly I had expected them to reach this point. I am guessing that they were contractually … Read moreOracle finally kills off Solaris and SPARC
First up, Tegile was acquired by Western Digital (WDC). This is in part due to WDC’s desire to be a one stop shop vertically integrated supplier for storage parts, systems, etc. This is how all of the storage parts OEMs needed to move, though Seagate failed to execute this correctly, selling off their array business … Read moreM&A and business things
Information at this link. It is being called a “strategic transaction”, though it likely came about vis-a-vis Seagate doing some profound and deep thinking over what business it was in. Seagate has been weathering a storm, and has been working on re-orgs to deal with a declining disk market. They acquired ClusterStor as part of … Read moreCray "acquires" ClusterStor business unit from Seagate
I’ve written about approved vendors and “one throat to choke” concept in the past. The short take from my vantage point as a small, not well known, but highly differentiated builder of high performance storage and computing systems … was that this brand specific focus was going to remove real differentiated solutions from market, while … Read moreWhat reduces risk … a great engineering and support team, or a brand name ?
Though, when I look at the “great speed”, it is often on par with or less than Scalable Informatics sustained years before. From 2013 SC13 show, on the show floor, after blasting through a POC at unheard of speed, and setting long standing records in the STAC-M3 benchmarks … Article in question is in the … Read moreI always love these breathless stories of great speed, and how VCs love them …
If you don’t know what I am talking about here, that’s fine. I’ll assume you don’t do hardware, or you call someone else when there is a hardware problem. If you think “well gee, don’t we have lspci? so why do we need this?” then you probably have not really tried to use lspci to … Read morepcilist: because sometimes you really, really need to know how your PCIe devices are configured
Way way back in the early aughts (2000’s), we had built a set of designs for an accelerator system to speed up things like BLAST, HMMer, and other codes. We were told that no one would buy such things, as the software layer was good enough and people didn’t want black boxes. This was part … Read moreBrings a smile to my face … #BioIT #HPC accelerator
I’ve been trying to help Scalable Informatics customers understand these market realities for a while. Unfortunately, to my discredit, I’ve not been very successful at doing so … and many groups seem to assume supply is plentiful and cheap across all storage modalities. Not true. And not likely true for at least the rest of … Read moreAnother article about the supply crisis hitting #SSD, #flash, #NVMe, #HPC #storage in general
Time and time again, the day job had been asked to discuss how the solutions are differentiated. Time and time again, we showed benchmarks on real workloads that show significant performance deltas. Not 2 or 3 sigma measurements. More often than not, 2x -> 10x better. Yet … yet … we were asked, again and … Read moreArchitecture matters, and yes Virginia, there are no silver bullets for performance