This is a short thread of thought, which was triggered by a casual browse through Wikipedia on another topic (for an article I swear I am writing, right now, as I er … uh … write this). Way back in graduate school, we all had read Feynman’s book. Call it required reading at the academy. Good things came out of this, as we (a few friends and I) reverse engineered his discussions of differentiation under the integral sign and suddenly got a real powerful tool available to us (which seems to have pissed off a few profs in classes with homework, but thats a story for another beer).

Short note on a story John linked to on InsideHPC.com Should HPC vendors go private is the question. Of the three vendors listed, two of them are HPC vendors, the third is a general vendor with a few HPC sales. Ok, who are the HPC vendors? This is a good question. I won’t give an exhaustive list, but the usual suspects are on that, where they derive all or most of their revenue from HPC.

… so it is better to point out that the distro people are saying it themselves: This is from lwn.net. Not me. Don’t shoot the messenger. The link to the thread in question contains far more explosive (for distro partisans) content. Without cherry picking this author, he does a very good and succinct job of describing what Fedora is and what it is not. To wit: Introduction of 4k stacks. Blew up lots of drivers, file systems, and other assorted things.

… and all throughout thehigh performance computing solutions house, all the creatures were stirring, they were using their own mouse. The JackRabbits were purring, pushing GB/s of data around, and the ΔV’s being booted, being worked, tested to be sound. The workers were filling orders, building units, making sure none were dead, while visions of high performance file systems and data motion danced in their heads. (with apologies to Clement Clarke Moore or Henry Livingston)

Buying back debt is a good thing. Company must be doing well. They had some rocky years for a while, but their costs are now under control, their market focus sharp, and they make their own stuff. John at InsideHPC has the scoop. They are obviously exploring new market directions (their CX unit announced last month), and this is a good thing. Hopefully they will get some bumper stickers out soon with “my other computer is a Cray” for SC08.

We were asked for an “emergency” quote for a system for a grant. One of the components fit nicely into the ΔV paradigm, basically as a disk to disk backup of 2x the main storage size for this cluster. The 24TB ΔV came in under $15k. Made me happy. Could have done the 36 TB ΔV, and I did consider it. It would have been overkill for this task. And it would have cost much less than $20k.

It’s been a year, so I feel I can talk a little bit about this. I won’t name names or provide details. More than a year ago, we had a PINO. I didn’t detect it early enough, but have learned since what the signs are. A PINO is a “Partner In Name Only”. A PINO is a “partner” (notice the scare quotes). This “partner” wanted to work with us to help grow their cluster business.

Linky here. I am not saying vote early and vote often. Just vote. This may be the most important election in our lifetimes … er … Anyone happy with theirJackRabbits, by all means, I encourage you to show your support.

I haven’t posted on accelerators in a while, and this will be short. I have posited that GPUs would basically win out in the accelerator wars, with possibly a distant second to something like Cell if enough of them could be made inexpensively available. My question now is, given the intent of Intel in this market, will Larrabee be able to get traction in the graphics world? And therefore, effectively displace nVidia (and to a lesser extent, AMD) as the accelerator king?

Saw this on the beowulf list today regarding MD3000’s from Dell. I hope this is not true. Jeff, can you chime in and tell me if this is real or not?