This article on HPCwire was a bit of an inspiration … (with apologies to Bob Dylan, and Guns and Roses) Mama take this cluster from me I can’t run on it anymore It’s getting slow too slow for me Feels like I’m knockin' on petaflops door Knock-knock-knockin' on petaflops door Knock-knock-knockin' on petaflops door Knock-knock-knockin' on petaflops door Knock-knock-knockin' on petaflops door Mama take my single cores from the rack I can’t run on them anymore That cold data center air is comin' down Feels like I’m knockin' on petaflops door Knock-knock-knockin' on petaflops door Knock-knock-knockin' on petaflops door Knock-knock-knockin' on petaflops door Knock-knock-knockin' on petaflops door … ok, I’ll keep my day job.

Ok … a nice article on HPC startup issues (really IT startup issues) at insidehpc. This is a good article. Makes the point that people are willing to spend on incremental change, and the revolutionary change requires a serious investment from (multiple) big players. There are other reasons I like this article, but I won’t go into those here. The point that Christopher makes is spot on. Exactly right. Innovation needs to make things simply drop in and work, with as little pain as possible.

I want to play with SUA and see how it fares against Cygwin. This is an issue for previous versions of Windows … SUA isn’t available, or SFU is intrusive (I won’t install it on my laptop due to all the things it wants to touch). This arose from conversations in the day job yesterday. Still have to pull down W2k8 to see if we can run it on JackRabbit. I want to get real builds of code going so that we can see if there is any advantage to running in SUA vs Cygwin.

Well, mostly I am interested in video/media streaming, real financial analytical/data-flow benchmarks (everyone does Black-Sholes, but is this the most meaningful benchmark to do?), and things from our friends in the petroleum industry. We want to put our JackRabbit storage systems to the test(s) as it were. One can run IOzone and bonnie++ so many times …

… convince your cluster users not to run as root user? Yet another story for beer-time. Any advice out there on how to explain how bad (really really bad) of an idea this is? I have tried, but they seem to not make the connection between this and spurious failures of jobs. Testing the system as a normal user shows it runs fine. There is a joke this reminds me of.

An article on HPCwire suggests that we live in dangerous times. Specifically hmmm … We have limited choices due to economics and market evolution. Way back when RISC was still hot, many people ignored those pesky CISC machines coming up. When those pesky CISC machines started putting down benchmarks of 0.25-1.25 of the performance of the RISC machines, at 1/10th their cost, people started to take serious interest in using them.

I read an “amusing” piece this past weekend, where people connected with the LHC project at CERN talked about how they would do data distribution and computation. Basically they are building their own data network, and doing some interesting bits with large volume data caching/distribution. Ok. Then we get this. You know, the “Grid” will make the internet obsolete. Oh bother. Let me ask a simple question of said media outlets.

In a good Freep article today, Katherine Yung described some of the dilemmas surrounding raising capital in the state of Michigan. Unfortunately for the state, the political echelon is targetting “advanced manufacturing”, as a priority, among several others. Later on Ms. Yung notes: Well, there is truth to that. But 2 years ago, during the initial 21st century fund effort, 700+ entrants applied for funds. Probably close to 400 companies. Quite a few would be called startups.

Not legal advice, go speak with a lawyer if you want that. And understand that they have a vested interest in an alternative position to what I say below. When forming a startup, do not, unless you are a glutton for punishment, use an LLC structure, and run as far away, as rapidly as possible, from people who suggest you should use it. Lawyers love LLCs as you have to keep coming back to them for any change.

page counter is broken. I put in StatPress. 1800 page visits yesterday (started at 10am) 2218 page visits as of midnight. Sheesh. This matches the logs and the post-read counts at the bottom. If you ask me, I do not have a clue as to what the page count is counting. So I am going to remove it soon from the right sidebar. What I can tell is, it is about 1 order of magnitude off.