I read a/. linked blog on ComputerWorld.UK this morning. In it was a most amusing characterization of Vista: The post goes on to suggest that upgrades are over as a business. I am not convinced this is true, but their point is that things like OpenOffice are pretty good. Well, yes. OO3 is actually quite good. I use it on Linux, on Windows. Even on Vista (long story, daughters future laptop … shhh … don’t tell her … would like to get her using Linux, maybe we will … lets see).

From TheFunded.com: Link to original is here. It starts out like this … I recommend reading it all. It reminds me as similar to Arthur C Clarke’s short story “Superiority”. A different side of this. [Update] I just noticed that the link doesn’t show all the text. It is supposed to be public. So I will reproduce it here.

One thing we continuously struggle with are users who decide to get the lowest cost (and often lowest quality) motherboards. You wind up spending so much extra time/effort to get these things to work correctly, that it completely overwhelms any cost savings you may have even thought to realize by buying them. Have one of these now. System refuses to boot a more modern kernel … some driver somewhere hangs. This isn’t our system, we wouldn’t sell MBs like this.

I am looking at new cluster stacks for a number of reasons. We have one internally (Tiburon) which is quite flexible and powerful, but I don’t want to push it out just yet (have some additional bits to deal with). I’d like to hear what people are using out there. Ones I am not interested in are Rocks and derivatives, Oscar. I am interested in xCAT2, and any others out there as stacks.

I recently had a run in with one of the “leaders” of a cluster management system. This person decided I went over the line in reporting on a security issue, our forensics, and how to go about helping prevent it in the future. Previously, I had been warned for daring to point to a benchmark document. Despite being a contributer to and a supporter of this technology, this offering, having written articles on it for magazine publication, having helped many customers use it … this “leader” decided that I had crossed a line.

Some time ago, I had posited that the right approach to building a viable business in accelerators was to target ubiquity. It is worth revisiting some of this and delving into how to make accelerator use painless. Basically, for people to get real value out of accelerators, they have to provide enough benefit over the life of the host platform such that the investment can be recouped. This is the fundamental raison d’etre for accelerators.

SC08 has been over for a few days. I have multiple impressions, and will try to outline them here. Please post your impressions as well. First: Being in Pervasive Software’s booth was great. They are a great group, with an interesting product. As they noted, most HPC is not Java, and they get that it won’t be for the forseeable future. That said, I think they got lots of good feedback from potential consumers of their product.

One of the aspects about being on a show floor all day, talking to partners, and prospective customers, is that you sort of have to ignore whats going on around you in the market outside of the walls of the center. The stock market closed below 8000 today. Some of the more traditional HPC stocks have been whalloped. Like SGI. On a day when the market dropped 5%, they dropped 16.

I saw many things at SC08 … first off, most of the people we saw running disks were running some sort of multi-pipe direct attached storage with RAID0’s. Yeah, this shows bandwidth real well. Not how users really run them, but it shows some nice inflated numbers. Compare this with a RAID10 running over a single iSCSI 10 GbE connection. Most folks are used to slow iSCSI, and can’t believe our numbers, until they see them.