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I haven’t seen it yet. Eventually when I get more time, I want play with it, but from what I have heard it is not ready for prime time yet. That said, I would like note that the Cygwin tools are really good. I just built LAM-7.1.1 using them. Tried it out and it works … Read more Thoughts on Microsoft cluster offerings

More reflections on the differences between architectures and products. Beowulf and most cluster systems are architectures to be built. Many vendors attempt to freeze the architecture, or restrict variations of it in order to build a polished product. Polished products are finished. They have a finished feel to them. Someone went through and actually made … Read more The difference between an architecture and a product [part 2]

High performance computing is a tough business. Customers always want more performance. Few want to pay more for this performance. Many vendors want to serve this market but precious few are pushing more than boxes. Its easy to push boxes, and the really low end vendors, likely having been burned as suppliers of low end … Read more Of business models, and business reality

This will be a short comment on something I have noticed with engineering led startups. The hardware oriented ones tend to have really neat architectures. Everything is technically beautiful. One problem though. They are not products. A product is finished. It has all the features one might expect out of a product. Yeah, this is … Read more The difference between an architecture and a product

I remain consistently amused by the makefiles we see. Some of them are broken beyond repair. If I told you where I found them, and the profile of the projects that they were in, you would have a hard time stopping laughing. No, I am not talking about the auto-generated monstrosities from the GNU auto-tools. … Read more Broken makefiles

Please see http://www.scalableinformatics.com/metadot/index.pl?iid=2179&#jobs for more details.

The first batch of setup day photos are up from SC’05. I am on the show floor looking about, talking with people thanks to the Cluster Monkies, and Linux Magazine. Looks to be an interesting show. Please be gentle on my picture taking skills, I am still getting used to this camera. Yes, I did … Read more Setup day batch 1

I am here at the Sun HPCC meeting, as they had asked us for a talk on Opteron performance on single and dual core processors for life and chemical science applications. At this talk we gave a peek at our recent HMMer and NCBI BLAST performance among other things. For HMMer, we believe we currently … Read more Conference: T -2 days and counting

Please look for us at SC05. I’ll be there with a camera and we have a nice site ready to display photos. Some changes from last year. Orion is not in ascendance. Ammasso is out of the game. The buzz is all around FPGAs (just wait until someone tries to port “hello world” .c to … Read more Blogging SC05

Its a very big HPC world. According to IDC and others, its a $7B+/year world, growing at a nice healthy clip, 10-20% CAGR, again, depending upon which market research report you read. Seems like a hot market… right? Well … sort of. The largest growth (>15% CAGR) is in the 10-25k$US region (small computing engines), … Read more Venture capital and high performance computing