This presentation on diversity in HPC. Diversity of HPC … machines, OSes, architectures … and comments from the author. Very good read. Did I mention it was good?

Previously I had told you about octobonnie. 8 simultaneous bonnies run locally to beat the heck out of our servers. If we are going to catch a machine based problem, it will likely show up under this wilting load. But while that is a heavy load, it is nothing like what we have going on now. I am sitting here in the office monitoring one of our boxes being tested by a customer before they put it into production (oil and gas market), as they load it from their cluster.

Ok, a little early for those in NA, but late for those in Oz and about past it for India, but as you can see from WorldTimeZone, its coming to europe/mid-africa as I write this…. happy new years to you all

The ruins of Detroit. Look for the Michigan Central Rail Road station, and see if you recognize this from the recent Transformers movie. The building is near Mexican Town, south-ish of the old Tiger Stadium.

… a weak dollar is a good dollar. Makes our exports more desireable. [ ](http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=USDGBP=X&t=1y&l=on&z=m&q=l&c=) From Yahoo, linked back to the page. Really, we need that dollar lower. Makes exporters happy.

Ok. I read something while I was semi-concious during my recent defeat at the hands of a 72 hour bug (that positively whupped me upside the head, stomach and other parts). I read Cisco is coming out with blade servers. Ok. Here is the 2 + 2 = 3 moment. Yeah, assume I am off the mark. Pure speculation. Shai, feel free to tell me here that I am full of it.

Ok, so the last post left you feeling like you should just spin up some Pink Floyd on the turntable … er … ok … I am dating myself here (turntable? sheesh). What I posited in the last post was that HPC has value. And it should be treated as such. But I also noted a few things. First: Short term credit for business is pretty much non-existent. This impacts all HPC providers, smaller ones with fewer capital reserves harder than larger ones with capital reserves.

John West at InsideHPC.com covers a very important issue … that being the meltdown of the economy, and its impact upon HPC, specifically HPC expenditure. Being on the vendor side of this I can offer my observations and make some suggestions. First, allow me to note something that might not be too obvious to those in academia or government labs. There is no credit in the market. There is effectively zero ability to borrow new capital to fund parts purchases for HPC vendors outside of their existing credit facilities.

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!! [whimper] [update] Mitch Albom goes a bit further. Says what needs to be said.

yup … a nice little down time courtesy of business class internet with SLAs … even though this is the home office, still … annoying. Considering rehosting at work …