This was annoying. Let the record show that W2k3 server doesn’t grok AHCI. So if you are trying to install it and it BSODs on you, turn off AHCI and redo your boot drive config in bios. Yeah, you give up performance, and a better interface. But it will boot now, without crashing.

… or there is a bug in the performance monitor. While I would like to believe the former (that JackRabbit is too fast), the latter is likely true. Look at this image, and then see the highlighted second image. Discussion in a moment. [ ](http://scalability.org/images/Screenshot-1.png) and [ ](http://scalability.org/images/Screenshot-small-1.png) Whats that? -1.97GB/s? So this is running IOmeter. We are seeing sustained about 1.15 GiB/s +/- a bit. Bouncing all over the place though.

About 3 years ago, I was at a Sun HPC consortium meeting, where there was excitement over the possibility of getting 1TFLOP into 2.5 racks with an ultra-dense server. This was cool. It was awesome. One of the conference organizers was talking to me about this, saying it was the densest possible system (at that time). Having just been through the accelerator card high level design process for a business plan/company concept we were pitching to VCs, I innocently (ok, well, not so innocently) asked … “Well, what if you could get a real sustainable 1TFLOP in a 4U box?

Happily, the Intel site has the right drivers for Windows 2008 for the motherboard gigabits. Just ordered some additional quad cards and a better network switch so we can push this harder. With 4 gigabit clients, we are seeing about 3.5x 1 GbE port in bandwidth. Working on it. Our test is incredibly simple. Set up IIS7 to serve files from a directory. Create 100 files of 100 MB each. System has 4 GB ram (ok more than that, but it is running 32 bit version of windows 2008, so all it sees is 4gb).

Too funny …

First, by now you have heard Tesla-10 is out. This is a significant performance step up, and I believe it has double precision capability. This is a hardware acceleration platform. Roadrunner hit the PetaFLOP regime. What is important about this is that it did it at a lower power than many had predicted a PetaFLOP would require, and did it somewhat sooner than others had been predicting. This is an accelerated supercomputer, using Cell technology.

This is nice. We have set up a secure remote desktop with Stunnel for Windows 2008 server on JackRabbit M. Vijay is working on doing some setup for our benchmarks, and I wanted a way to give him access while he works remotely. Sure enough, setup wasn’t too painful, simply follow directions at this link. Still have to order extra NICs and a new gigabit switch, but otherwise we are about ready to load test …

Up early on a friday morning, working through todays' issues and … found this article on Linux Magazine by the esteemed Doug Eadline. I was in on the discussion that he refers to, and pointed out that you do in fact get what you pay for, and that you will not get an engineered system in many cases. Worse, the configs will likely be those that minimize vendor costs, as that is the problem they are attempting to solve in a low margin business (clusters).

A while ago, I had been advised to try SUA as part of windows. I was told it was much better than cygwin, and it is supported by Microsoft. Stuff will work, I was told. Well, of these statements, I can say I believe “supported by Microsoft” is probably the true one. Pulled down bonnie tarball. Tried to compile it. No luck. Pulled down IOzone tarball. Tried to compile it. No luck.

There we are, trying to use W2k3 server for the customer benchmark on JackRabbit. So we install it … or try to install it and … BSOD (growl) No, I am not going to tear into Windows on this. W2k3 is old software kit. Yes, I did hit F6 to try to fix it, and add drivers. No, it never got to the point of letting me. Won’t spend more time on this.