John West at InsideHPC.com points to a great article this morning from Intel. Well, ok, I didn’t agree with the initial tone. This is a bit on the (negative) sensationalist side, though the author is correct in pointing out that these technologies have been overhyped. I’ve been using a phrase to discuss this and other issues for a while. There are no silver bullets. Or as Robert Heinlein once wrote, TANSTAAFL.

John West at InsideHPC has a brief article on SGI, noting that they have received their second delisting notice. As of now, SGI, a company I spent 6 years at, and really enjoyed my time there (apart from the decisions various company senior management made), which hit a $4B valuation at one point, is currently worth $5.24M. SGI was once a great company. What made SGI great were the people, some of whom are still there.

1.3 PB lustre OSSes/OSTs with a Velocibunny MDS quote … under $800k … wow!

This was a fun exercise, not sure if our WAG is in the right ball-park though, as some of the elements won’t have real price tags for a while. This was an intelligent guess based upon comparable systems pricing. 28x 4U 48 TB JackRabbit (JR4) units with 32 GB ram, 2x QDR IB ports, 2x SSD boot drives in a RAID1 + a “Velocibunny” MDS (1.5 TB of the fastest non-RAMdisk based server around) running Lustre.

Generating quote after quote after … no rest for the wicked …

debugging iscsi issues on two different kernels … yay …

Maybe I am not such an old fogey … on twitter now. Whats next … facebook? Darn … I purposely went all Luddite over MySpace … was hoping to do the same thing with facebook. Now how to figure out how to link to the blog …

As part of the toolchain for JackRabbit and ΔV, we depend upon Perl and various Perl modules. Previously, for DragonFly’s prior incarnation, we built our own toolchain. The issue is that the Perl distributed with RHEL/Centos, Debian/Ubuntu usually includes some … er … ill-advised patches. We had built our own in the past, and it suited us well, as it felt faster. Well, for a number of reasons we are back at it.

Tis the season for sales … this one targeted at academia/research … See the link for details. JackRabbit, our tightly coupled processing and storage system that unabashedly dominates performance among units of similar density, at a much lower price point, lowers that price point even more for research/education/academic customers. You can get a 48 TB raw JackRabbit unit which as we have noted before, sustains 1.57 GB/s on writes, and 1.

Been a mercurial user for a while, mercurial was IMO more mature when we started using it about 1.5 years ago. Git was new, and not quite as easy to deal with. What a difference 1.5 years make. I find starting/importing new projects with Mercurial harder than I like. Its not bad, it just takes a bit more thinking than I want during import. So I tried git tonight. Imported the deltaV tools in.