mwhahaha!!!! Cuda goodness. Will get updated GPU-HMMer data with real C1060s.

Yeah … I did just nuke my own email server for about 30 minutes. My bad. All better (no really, all better!).

Rackable, which does do some HPC, is trimming down.

While not HPC related, we live in a non-ivory tower world. Satyam is one of the large Indian outsourcing firms. Last week, the founding brothers admitted to serious irregularities and fraud. This week the Indian government is moving swiftly to try to contain the damage. The relation to HPC comes through other Indian outsourcing providers such as Tata and Wipro, both of whom have HPC efforts underway. This scandal should not impact them, though it could partially undermine confidence in this business model.

See this link at Yahoo. We have lots of customers with Nortel switches. We don’t use them that much, but others have. I don’t expect this to be the last to file for protection, by any stretch of the imagination.

As seen on Barrons. CEO Watkins is out, replaced with Stephen Luczo. Seagate makes good disk drives, and drive prices have been hammered in recent weeks. Pricing went into something near a free-fall over the last 6 weeks. While this is good for JackRabbit and ΔV customers, it is bad for drive manufacturers that have to show a sustained profit. Seagate is reporting that it had a bad December, and as many other technological based product outfits have as well, I think this may be the first of many such announcements.

John at InsideHPC.com has a discussion going on HPC virtualization. Basically John’s point is that programmer/user time is more valuable than machine raw power. And that while VMs pull down performance, machine utilization is so low to begin with, that it doesn’t matter. I don’t disagree that machine utilization is low, nor do I disagree that VMs will impact performance. I don’t dispute that programmer/user time is important. The issue I keep running into is the quality of compiler generated code.

Basically someone decided to fire off many emails to us. Their effort was from some team of bots (ToB), and came largely from the .ru domain. I wrote some quick and dirty tools to scan our logs, and generate a hash table of IP addresses, and plugged this into a smtpd client filter. So after the first few failed emails, we have the bot’s signature. And we can reject future emails from them, even for a short period of time.

Yes, someone with lots of machines in a .ru domain, is trying to send us lots of spam. Trying a DoS, but I don’t think its working all that well. But what is troubling to me is that several of the machines listed give .army.mil addresses. Which, if they aren’t forged, says something profoundly bad about security on our armed forces machines. Sure, they could be little spambots. Imagine if they were more than little spambots.

I thought there might be some interest in this, given some of the posts we have done last year. If I hit article length (suspect I will), then I’ll submit it for publication. As a teaser, the baseline version of rzf for arguments -l 1000000000 -n 2 takes 34.83s on my laptop CPU, while the SSE2 version of the same code takes 7.62s. As this is a Cuda enabled laptop, I intend to get this version going as well shortly.