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Positives and negatives

2006-04-27 by joe

Positive news: My company has been selected to present at the Michigan GCS. This is in line with what we submitted to the 21st century fund a few months ago. Also, we received notes that 2 of our applications had passed compliance screening for this. The end game of this is to ramp up an … Read more Positives and negatives

SCSI vs FC vs SATA

2006-04-26 by joe

I have heard this argument come up again several times recently. Lots of folks out there from the enterprise storage realm still love their FC drives. The SCSI crowd like their units. Both handily disparage SATA as being inferior, poorly performing, or with higher failure rates.
This is an interesting point.
As far as I am aware, all the drives come physically off the same manufacturing production line. The only significant difference between the units that I am aware of (modulo newer motors on newer units) are the electronics that connect to the bus.

In the limit, as N(cores) -> infinity …

2006-04-13 by joe

So way back in the good old days, programming a single core CPU in a high performance manner was a challenge. Compilers promised much and delivered small fractions of maximum theoretical performance. To get nearly optimal performance, you had to hand code assembly language routines. You would never be able to achieve 100% utilization of the processor capabilities, but you might be able to sufficiently balance memory operations with floating point and integer operations so that you were utilizing a sizeable fraction of the chips subsystem capabilities.

MEDC update

2006-04-13 by joe

According to the MEDC site, 505 applications were turned in for mostly commercial efforts. 505… The mind boggles. Of those 505, 139 are commercialization. Another smattering are also commercial, though hidden. Call that 150 commercial ones. In all the previous competitions; the MLSC (Michigan Life Science Corridor), the MTTC (Michigan Tri Technology Corridor), the commercial … Read more MEDC update

To (open)solaris or not to (open)solaris, that is the question

2006-04-10 by joe

Platform consolidation is in full swing in HPC, has been for a while. This is an economic reality. The platforms we are being told by ISVs, that will be supported into the future are Windows and Linux. We don’t see much new AIX support. It is simply not a volume platform. Nor do we see … Read more To (open)solaris or not to (open)solaris, that is the question

What OSes will run on the supercomputers of the future?

2006-03-28 by joe

This is not a simple question to answer. It likely will change a few times over the course of time. But we can be reasonably sure that their won’t be widespread installations of Irix, AIX, HP/UX and others of their ilk. There are many reasons for this, technological, legal, business, marketing, and so forth. Looking … Read more What OSes will run on the supercomputers of the future?

The coming of the "grid" (the hopefully hype-free or hype-reduced model that is)

2006-03-21 by joe

Someone gets it. I can’t say much more now, or even point to who gets it. Then again, with all companies and decisions comes baggage. While they get the idea, there is this little manner of the baggage they attached to their grid to fix another problem. Customers bringing application code over to their grid, … Read more The coming of the "grid" (the hopefully hype-free or hype-reduced model that is)

Are we back to bubble-nomics again?

2006-03-20 by joe

I know, its dangerous to Post Before Coffee (PBC) in the morning. It increases the possibility of missing critical features of an argument, and there tends to be more bloviation, stream of approximately conciousness, and so forth. I read an article this morning from the Wall Street Journal’s WSJ.com site that evoked many emotions and … Read more Are we back to bubble-nomics again?

Michigan's 21st Century Jobs Fund

2006-03-16 by joe

Competition is in full swing. This is the first year it is (mostly) well designed to make a difference to Michigan. Kudos for the folks that resisted the pressure to make this identical to the MTTC/MLSC of prior years. You can still see echos of that pressure, but I expect this to be a very … Read more Michigan's 21st Century Jobs Fund

It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

2006-03-08 by joe

SGI announced another RIF. Thats more good people tossed onto the street. Thats good technology about to be or already dumped. SGI and I go way back, to 1993 when I started running molecular dynamics simulations on SGI machines. These machines were fast (those R3000’s were like butta …). I liked them so much, and … Read more It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.