This is a 15 drive JackRabbit unit (under $6500 USD the way we have it configured), where we carved 2 drives out for OS, and built a RAID6 across 12 drives, with 1 hot spare. Just finished the other tests. Pretty pleased with the results. Still have to do driver and kernel updates, but I want a simple baseline test. So here it is. root@crunch:~/jr# bonnie++ -d /big -u root -f Using uid:0, gid:0.

This unit will be (eventually) the replacement for our older central server at our new space (woo-hoo!!!!). Right now, taking to the test track as it were. Simple machine: 16 GB ram, 4 cores, 7.5 TB of raw storage. In a deskside case. Works well for offices. This configuration would be right about $5900 list. RAID6 with one hot spare would drop it to 6TB for storage. Carving out 2 drives for OS (as I did) would bring it down to 5TB.

We check logs to make sure things are working. Nothing like getting a huge number of failed requests to spoil your day. So some things stick out. Like 1 request per second for 10,000+ seconds from a single site. In this case, in France. Or a bot getting stuck in a calendar. Like the Microsoft bot. In the case of the former, it happened this morning. The easiest thing to do is simply to firewall them off.

Took a Cuda class. Installed Cuda on my laptop. Well, 1.1 on my laptop. It has a Cuda class GPU (one of the things I made sure of when I bought it). 2.0 is in beta, and I think I will use that. A few minor glitches getting it going. That said, I have some simple impressions. Cuda is going to have significant market momentum by mid year. Unlike most of the other accelerator platforms, the SDK is free, and is easy to use.

Looks like the rumored deal closed. HP now has a generally well regarded services team, with deep US government connections. Going to give IBM a run for its money. The question is whom else will tie up? And how? EDS isn’t an HPC vendor/provider, but HP is. Which suggests that if there is money to be made in “them thar hills” of HPC (and there is), that EDS may be retooling for this.

This post at Storage Soupoffice furniture in Bulgaria eviscerates Sun’s moves in storage, and rips into thumper (x4500, which our JackRabbit competes with). Some of the writing mirrors some discussions I have had recently in terms of what has happened to Sun. Where are they going, what are they doing.

Just updated laptop to Ubuntu 8.04. This is a Dell dual core unit, and while the phrase “remove it from my cold dead fingers” comes to mind (yeah, it is pretty good), some things in the new release don’t work well. Ok, well they do work better than before. But some of the “helper” bits are horribly broken. Suppose you want to install Cuda on this laptop (I did). And you want the new model Cuda aware driver (I did).

Well, there is an economic slowdown going on, so we shouldn’t be surprised when Intel and Microsoft post slightly lower earnings. Some HPC companies are getting hammered though. SGI just announced earnings, or more correctly, losses for the quarter. You can read it online at Yahoo finance and others. They lost 14% today. Down into the $7/share region. ClearSpeed, who I have talked about before, is being hammered. See their graph (also at Yahoo finance)

A number of new things happening on the JackRabbit front. First, 2 new models: the deskside unit with 15 drive bays, and the JackRabbit-M (JRM) unit with 24 drive bays. The deskside is targeted at groups running calculations on their desktops or small clusters, that need a local high performance low cost storage resource. The JRM unit is midrange between the JRS and the JR, with 12-24 TB raw capacity, and 1 to 2 RAID cards.

Long day, spent most of it talking to people and groups. This is a small conference, attendance is ok, not heavy, not light. Saw lots of people I know/knew. Some I met today. Met Deepak from BBGM in person, and a number of people I have conversed with in the past through email/phone. Saw a few old colleagues. On the exhibits/discussions … some memes I see floating about, and have been hearing for a while.