Well, this is a machine going out to a customer later today. Numbers aren’t so bad. Will explain a little more in a moment. root@pegasus-i:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=/local/data.file bs=8M count=1024 1024+0 records in 1024+0 records out 8589934592 bytes (8.6 GB) copied, 40.328 s, 213 MB/s root@pegasus-i:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=/local/data.file bs=8M count=1024 oflag=direct 1024+0 records in 1024+0 records out 8589934592 bytes (8.6 GB) copied, 25.6982 s, 334 MB/s root@pegasus-i:~# dd if=/local/data.file of=/dev/null bs=8M 1024+0 records in 1024+0 records out 8589934592 bytes (8.

… and already 2 groups want it for a month, and at least one other wants some benchmarks. Benchmarks we have agreed to run on it to date, including the usual suspects, as well as a windows server 2003 R2 file streaming BM, and some others. Some are asking us to test with various IB/10 GbE, do throughput studies, etc. There are a few new features which we will be running down over the next few weeks.

your niece texts your wife over SMS, and she asks you “what does ‘KK’ mean”, and you have to google it. Hit my superego where it hurts …

Well, after using it 3 weeks on my laptop, I am underwhelmed. 7.10 was much better. Everything just worked and there were no crashes. From Firefox 3.0-beta5 which broke about 50% of my plugins, through the sudden hard locks with the Verizon cell card (the other system did not do this), to the still completely borked video driver bit. Just try to install a Cuda graphics driver. You have to edit /sbin/lrm-video and comment out its “intelligence” as the other published methods simply do not work.

Call this an object lesson in what not to do. Well, to be fair, the idea, the fundamental concept is excellent. It on target. Its the implementation details that turn this good idea into a waste of time, effort, and money for those competing. This is a post about Michigan, and its 21st century fund business plan competition. It is also a post about business conditions in the state. It is also a post about areas that Michigan is investing in, and areas it should be investing in (the two are not the same).

Sorry folks, been incredibly busy for last 3 weeks. Very little time to comment on anything. Email box full of stuff I am working through. Will get back into this early this coming week.

There was a bit of a kerfluffle last week over weak random number generators and SSL for Debian and Debian based distributions. This vulnerability made it actually easy to crack a key generated with the OpenSSL code. Think about the basis for this risk. SSL is based upon hard to guess integers which are built out of “entropy” (the CS definition, not the physical definition) to ensure “randomness” of some sort, and then used to construct keys.

I have been a long proponent of meaningful benchmarks. Meaningful benchmarks are those that can be used with a reasonable level of predictive power to help in sizing and other issues. I am also a proponent of market/institutional knowledge … if you have been working in HPC for a while, you might have a clue as to how some systems run, some good design points, some really bad ideas (“hey lets run a cluster over pairs of SLIP lines”).

I don’t have any hard numbers on this, but we have been hearing from various sources that data sets and data sizes are doubling every 6 to 9 months just in the Life Sciences market. Still looking for sources for this, but this anecdotal data suggests problems with retention, management, backup, data motion, …

Every now and then we run into situations where someone just does not wish to succeed with their task or mission. Maybe they don’t like the mission, or the people, or the technology. They appear to be following the scope/plan of the mission, but their actions run counter to the goals that have been set out for them. Their ulterior motive is to set up the thing they were missioned to do to fail.