So I wrote a post in anger, and deleted it. My apologies. I have a saying I like to tell people: things that are designed to fail, often do. I run into this day in and day out. Bad cluster designs, bad storage designs, bad network designs. Poor choices in all of the above. I still can’t get over the two 128 port switches coupled together with a single gigabit uplink.

You can see us (and a ΔV) in all its glory … here … Me talking to someone: [ ](http://picasaweb.google.com/JohnBoker/Linuxfest2008#5256640887091893346) I am the guy without so much hair (on his head), and black JackRabbit shirt, and the water in his right hand. Here is the “booth” [ ](http://picasaweb.google.com/JohnBoker/Linuxfest2008#5256640896772943522) Here is a picture of Doug looking as tired as we both felt … [ ](http://picasaweb.google.com/JohnBoker/Linuxfest2008#5256640900034994482) But wait … there’s more! we had a very nice … I can’t say enough nice things about nVidia cards, nice nVidia card in our Cuda box, which we used to … er … run a desktop That was streaming something like 7 movies from ΔV while we were rotating a number of OpenInventor and WRL (VRML) models using the OpenInventor ivview.

We showed off a unit at the Ohio Linux Fest this past weekend. We had it streaming anywhere from 3-10 videos while doing lots of other things. Needless to say, the interest there was striking. We gathered a great deal of good feedback, as well as quite a few (hopeful) leads. I had set up apache2 to stream movies from the Internet Archive that I had pulled onto the machine for other tests.

What you see below is from a $5400USD list price machine on initial run through, pre-tuning. Please remember that as you look at these numbers. This is less than $1USD per usable GB. Will be formally introduced/announced soon. You can see one live at ohiolinuxfest this weekend (this exact machine as it turns out). This is a RAID6 unit. We could go RAID5 and increase performance, though running in a configuration we do not recommend.

… DragonFly in this case. Turns out that I had a wrong database setting that nuked one of our major functions. It would run the code. It just wouldn’t return anything. Turns out this was due to a missing column (do’h!). How a column goes missing … I dunno. Ok, we moved it from an old machine to a newer dedidcated machine. Maybe a column fell out of the bits when we trucked the data over.

… is the biggest non-sunk cost aspect for an HPC system, outside any software licensing costs, which have a habit of often dwarfing the system cost. At InsideHPC.com, John West does an analysis of the RedHat HPC announcement. In a word, yes. It is very much an issue for the broader market. Remember, HPC at the top, is shrinking in relative terms as a fraction of the HPC market. I haven’t looked at the numbers recently, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see an absolute shrinkage as well.

JackRabbit that is … And now for something completely different. A bunny with a mean streak, a mile wide …

Took me way too long to get these up. Our open source tools will be hosted here. Right now, simple tools like ifinfo, and bbs are up. Our public SGEtools will show up soon. Older releases of our finishing scripts will find the way there as well. We are deciding upon which other tools we will release this way. Please stay tuned.

Working out issues with the installation of an OS onto a CF device. Odd situation. OS installs all the way. Upon reboot, whammo, not enough grub to do more than print a message saying something to the effect of “you are hosed”. This is OpenSuSE 10.3 for a JackRabbit flying out the door tuesday morning. Earlier if possible. Turns out that this wasn’t confined to SuSE. A number of the other distros did the same thing.

Will be showing a unit at OhioLinuxFest in Columbus late next week. Think … less expensive than JackRabbit, and not as fast, though still pretty fast. This unit can scale down in performance and price, as well as up, to 36 TB per unit. Management via a web and cli interface. Price points are completely insane. Some very neat features … more soon. I promise.