… is in not knowing if the people are able to do what you need them to do. So far, I can say I have found (and kept) one great person. I haven’t been too successful at finding good HPC people otherwise. I was saddened to hear that a friend had been let go of his employer. I suggested considering us. And up until yestereday, I was under the impression I had my next great person.

I forgot to mention this. Odd. Our updated JackRabbit (JR4 f.k.a JRM) unit being burnt in over the last few days for a customer. Putting obscene loads on it. Trying hard to crash it. Really. From fio (apart from the 4M buffer size issue, I really like fio) streaming-write: (groupid=0, jobs=1): err= 0: pid=12270 write: io=6,397GiB, bw=1,498MiB/s, iops=365, runt=4479113msec clat (msec): min=1, max=4,560, avg= 2.73, stdev=10.33 bw (KiB/s) : min= 0, max=2427840, per=101.

I don’t mean to rain on anyone’s cloud (ok … ok … been wanting to say that … ), but the double whammy of Google’s GMail and now zero-day phishing attack starts begging some serious questions of risk and security in “the cloud”. Ok, I know, there are many different clouds. Ones within a firewall and local to a campus, ones external to a firewall or at a remote campus. There are SaaS, PaaS, and-any-other-letter-you-wish-aaS type apps.

… the day job accepts credit cards (Visa, MC, AMEX) directly. A long … long … time ago, I was critical of one of my former employers for not doing this … pointing out that we had lost sales as a result of it. I do not believe in erecting barriers to users buying what we sell. I want to streamline the processes and make them easier. Faster. Better. We are working very hard at getting a better web-store up (I have seen the new one and it is good) so that our customers can order Delta-V’s, JackRabbits, Pegasus and Pegasus-GPU systems online as simple as a few mouse clicks (and some credit card information).

Continuing a previous thread, here is data from a recent RAID6 JackRabbit test. This is a 24 bay, 24 TB machine, with 64 GB ram, 8 processor cores, 1x DDR IB port, 2x GbE. [root@jackrabbit ~]# iozone -s 32g -r 2048 -t 4 -F /big/f.0 /big/f.1 /big/f.2 /big/f.3 Iozone: Performance Test of File I/O Version $Revision: 3.315 $ Compiled for 64 bit mode. Build: linux Contributors:William Norcott, Don Capps, Isom Crawford, Kirby Collins Al Slater, Scott Rhine, Mike Wisner, Ken Goss Steve Landherr, Brad Smith, Mark Kelly, Dr.

John West at InsideHPC.com links to an article I read last week and didn’t comment on. In this article David Driggers, CTO at Verari, points out what he believes to be the top 5 trends in HPC. In no particular order, he points out that CAS (content addressable storage) is “breakthrough technology” for archiving. Which is odd. In that industry insiders appear to have a somewhat different opinion on thevalue of CAS for archiving.

One of the issues often raised in discussions with users are IOP performance of JackRabbit. We have measured our 24 bay unit performance at a bit more than 5000 IOPs (8k random reads, as closely matching a test case handed to us by a customer looking at a competitive box, which scored under 4300 IOPs on the same test). The problem is that getting consistent workable tools to do this measurement is hard … windows users use IOmeter, other users will use SPC-1 and related.

New firmware on controllers, new drivers, still haven’t worked all the tuning out perfectly yet, but getting there. [root@<a href="http://scalableinformatics.com/jackrabbit">jackrabbit</a> ~]# bonnie++ -u root -d /raid60 -f Using uid:0, gid:0. Writing intelligently...done Rewriting...done Reading intelligently...done start 'em...done...done...done...done...done... Create files in sequential order...done. Stat files in sequential order...done. Delete files in sequential order...done. Create files in random order...done. Stat files in random order...done. Delete files in random order...done. Version 1.94 ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random- Concurrency 1 -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks-- Machine Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP /sec %CP jackrabbit 124G 887738 98 285392 46 1182583 96 417.

… with orders, support, coding, customer visits, proposals … Will resume posting again shortly …

Seagate has created a new line of drives, named Constellation. Spec’s look good, capacities up to 2TB on 3.5" version. SAS v2 (6.0 Gbps) as well as SATA. As soon as we can get our hands on these, we will start working on qualifying them for JackRabbit and ΔV. 96TB in 5U, 48TB in 4U, 32TB in 3U, 24TB in 2U.