Why not. JackRabbit-M (24 bay unit) running W2k8 RC2. [ ](http://scalability.org/images/w2k8-JRM.png)

So now you know that we are testing a unit with Windows 2008 on JackRabbit. Some of the things which struck me during this load were how initially simple the OS load appeared to be. It basically copied all it needed to the disk, rebooted, and installed. Ok, great. Except for the fact that it didn’t by default, recognize the on-board NICs. This means that we need to either find a second network card, or get the NICs going on the motherboard.

Testing a JackRabbit M (24 bay unit) with Windows 2008 RC2. Initial impressions are that the installation of 2008 isn’t bad at all, though it seems not to recognize things on the motherboard, like NICs. Administration is still painful … things are spread out over multiple guis, and you have to struggle to get IE to behave the way you need it. So much so that Firefox 2.0.0.14 is now installed.

Yeah baby! The worlds fastest supercomputer is an accelerated (Cell based) system. For those who can’t parse the number, 1.026E15 is 1.026 x 10^15, or 1.026 x 1 (followed by 15 zeros). 1 Million is 1E6 or Mega, 1 Billion is 1E9 or Giga (though I understand the UK and a few others use a different phrase … thousand millions), 1 Trillion is 1E12 or Tera, and 1 Quadrillion is 1E15 or Peta.

When last we left young Luke ClusterDesigner, he was pondering whether or not to use one or the other vendors chips in the latest system they were to bid to customers for an RFP. Alas, along came one (then two) chip vendors offering “marketing support” (wink wink nudge nudge, say no more!) to young Luke. The farce was indeed strong with young Luke as he applied that “marketing support” to effectively reduce the cost of the processors he put into the cluster, thus decreasing the cost of the cluster for them to build.

I mean, really, one of those days. If you don’t know what I mean, then, well, you haven’t had one, and cannot commiserate. I am having one of those days. My trusty Nokia E61 is in a cab somewhere in London. Not in the same part of London that I am in. Yeah, its been one of those days. Remember, the Crackberry … er … blackberry 8830 world phone “isn’t” (that is, it doesn’t work here, with their GSM card, as they cannot or will not test it before they ship it).

So I have a Blackberry. I mentioned “cold-dead fingers” before. Crackberry is appropriate. It just works. And works really really well. That is, unless you have Verizon Wireless 8830 World phone. They issue you a GSM card. They activate it for you. What they can’t do before you leave? Test it. I am over in the UK with a non-working BlackBerry 8830 phone. Don’t get me wrong, the phone (CDMA) works well in the US.

Talking at a conference. Conference is about outsourcing and I am talking about HPC. Go figure. Old version of this was deleted. Somehow got corrupted. Navigation in London is … well … a challenge. Street signs would be a nice addition. They are often hard to find if they exist at all. Determining what street you are on, and what direction you are traveling in is also a challenge. Getting ready to leave for the conference.

I make a rough guess that they are using the same tools they are using on their desktops or laptops. It is a guess. This said, some interesting trends emerge from ~2 months of data and 2000-3000 visitors per day. Visitors OS: [ ](http://scalability.org/images/visitors.png) Browsers [ ](http://scalability.org/images/browsers.png) Search engines [ ](http://scalability.org/images/search.png) Ok, I am surprised. 21% of visitors appear to be using Linux. Ok, more than that, that under 70% appear to be using windows flavors.

[xxx@yyy~]$ uptime 15:07:51 up 505 days, 47 min, 14 users, load average: 0.39, 0.35, 0.19 [xxx@yyy~]$ uname -s Linux 43.6 mega-seconds. For the pair of 1.6 GHz CPUs that are in here, this is a combined 1.4 x 10^17 clock cycles. Or for the chemists among us … this is 0.23 micro-mole of clock cycles. You would need 4.3 million of these machines to provide one mole (6.022 x 10^23) cycles per year.