Maybe we should pitch? I dunno (we are looking for capital to grow and hire people … go figure). Here is his post. His criteria are simple, and quite good: That is, for him to invest, you have to open your idea up. If it is defensible, and you have a shot, he might sign on. However, he might not. How is this different from the VC meet/greet events that you have to pay $1000+ for, in order to present your idea to “funders”?

As usual, Doug works his magic, comes through in a pinch. See our link. GPU-HMMer measurements giving about 100x on 3 GPUs over a Shanghai AMD processor that forms the computing substrate for the GPUs. But we are also point to Pegasus-GPU, which is our new GPU box powered by Tesla GPUs from NVIDIA. We should have pictures up soon (unit is in lab, glowing a faint blue …). Data sheets, product sheets and … wait for it … online ordering … coming very shortly.

We are shopping for a new merchant services provider thanks in part to Paypal and its rather annoying rules. Like not being able to process transactions over $10k USD. Oh sure, they could do it if they wanted to … but they don’t want to. Ask them, and they will tell you that it is against Federal law. Thats what they told me a while ago. Ask Paymentech or Authorize.net and you will hear something different.

This isn’t a politcal blog, and this isn’t a political post. This is a blog about HPC, and the business of HPC. Which is global. Which means that HPC is impacted by political winds as surely as the political winds themselves blow. Most of the time we can ignore it. Some of the time, bad ideas emerge. John West at InsideHPC.com pointed out some of the rhetoric circling about the massive spending bill under consideration in the US government.

Can’t post from my email account, the one subscribed to, and receiving SGE email. Claims I am not subscribed. Ok. Then I try from the gmail account. Accepts my subscription. And then doesn’t let me respond. Borked mailing lists are no fun. I screwed up the mpihmmer list for a while (by accident) without realizing it. Fixing them is even less fun (mailman is … well … a multi-cup-of-coffee-diagnostic-event) Hopefully someone will ping the list admins to investigate.

I have been displeased with the massive upswing in spam, and not looking forward to 30-40k spam messages next month. So I did some research on the additional features of our MTA, and then did some analysis of the spam we had. With a few quick changes, focusing on where/from whom we were getting the most spam, I instituted and tested some additional filter elements. If you get caught in this filter and need to let me know, contact me through gmail.

That all of these are modeled on HPC gives me the tie-in to HPC that we need. I think we need more theoretical development, modeling, and model refinement. HPC systems accord us virtual laboratories that allow us to create and probe state spaces that may be impossible to consider in an experimental sense otherwise. And this is, IMO, where we need to spend more time/effort/cycles. Sadly we have political views impinging into scientific research, and this is problematic.

This has become our mantra. There is a nice article in The Economist about this. While JackRabbit provides best of breed performance for what it does, and it also costs less than other solutions. Quite a bit less in most cases. While we are hearing, from customers and users, of “orders of magnitude” better performance (their words … multiple customers) than competitive boxes, we are emphasizing less stress on the budget aspect.

Just ran through the configuration pricing model on it. 48TB ΔV4 came out around $18k USD. Add in a dual port 10GbE NIC for $500, and you have a seriously awesome iSCSI target box (not to mention a very very fast NFS / CIFS box). Wow. We are refreshing/updating our ΔV line for 1Q2009, so expect some new pricing bits soon.

Engadget is reporting (thanks Andrew!) that 2TB drives are about to ship from Western Digital. In the face of Seagate’s … er … firmware issues I think we are going to see Western Digital drives in JackRabbit’s soon as a standard option. Not sure if these are enterprise drives going on sale (not likely, betting they are consumer drives), but we have customers that want these. 48 of these in 5U.