Fixstars is there with its recent acquisition of Terrasoft. Fixstars makes very interesting Cell accelerator cards, and we can place them into units like Pegasus for deskside, and JackRabbit and ΔV for server applications. This looks to be the first viable Cell accelerator card. Terrasoft was pretty good with the OS/tools side of things, so hopefully the combination of these two will result in good challenger to GPUs. Pricing is close to where it needs to be.

We have spoken to a whole bunch of people about mpiHMMer and the incredible work JP has done on it. For those who don’t know, mpiHMMer is an MPI implementation of the HMMer code base. JP is working on getting it into the nVidia booth/machines, and will run a few demos tomorrow for people. [Let me know if you would like to see it](mailto:joe@scalability.org?subject=mpiHMMer demo). If you are not sure why it is interesting, consider that it has a multiple GPU version that JP benchmarked at more than 100x performance gain.

This wasn’t on purpose. We got there a little late, saw a line outside the door … which didn’t move … :(

This show is for the birds …. the pidgeons that is … the ones wandering near the booth. I hope that … er … ah … nothing gets into the machines … Not exactly bugs, but it is possible that someone could tell you that your machine is full of pidgeon droppings … and mean it in a literal sense.

Ok, we have the machines set up in the Pervasive Software booth, #203. Had a power hiccup (e.g. Joe knocked the power out while moving the rack) so we used this as an excuse to reconfigure the RAID to its RAID10 state. There really was no advantage to the RAID0 version, and the risk of problems was higher. RAID should be resynched in another 53 minutes. We have a single 10 GbE handling all the traffic … looks like Windows didn’t like sending traffic simultaneously on both links.

Here we are, sitting in that most important spot, by the coffee, waiting for our cohorts and colleagues … Austin is a nice place… the SC08 map is kinda … I dunno … a little small-ish? Some of us [old : Dougs suggestion, talking about me] folks can’t quite read it …

Make sure you look at their data mining demo. DataRush (as indicated in the previous post) is a cool technology, and we are happy to be helping out. Pervasive Software has a vision for data intensive HPC that aligns well with what we have been saying. Personal supercomputing has been something we have been talking about for about 8 years, since I developed CT-BLAST. That was a tool to completely hide the pain of dealing with clusters for running one application, NCBI BLAST.

We have called this other names in the past, but basically data intensive HPC is pretty much anything that involves streaming huge amounts of data past processing elements to effect the calculation or analysis at hand. This type of HPC is not usually typified by large linear algebra solvers, so things like HPCC and LINPACK are less meaningful characterizations for data intensive performance, as this often relies upon significant IO firepower, as well as many cores.

… is like any other business, there are ups and downs. Companies in HPC, as core HPC companies, and those with HPC practices are not immune to state of economy as a whole. If spending drops precipitously, business needs to re-adjust, and re-align. It definitely hurts if you are one of those … re-aligned. I have been there, and done that. I have been “re-aligned” twice, during downturns. The most recent time has been during the last bubble in 2002.