So we have this counter plugin. And it counts slowly. I am not sure why. Looking over our logs, it seems that we have quite a bit of activity, though looking at the counter, it doesn’t look like it. So, I installed StatPress. Since 10am this monring (7pm now) we have had over 1000 visits. Yet the counter plugin reports barely 150 visits. These 1000 visits are about 1/2 RSS feeds, page views, and related.

I had previously noted that some T&C;’s we run into are, well, not fit for company consumption. This isn’t the only aspect of of the HPC market … clusters as commodities and other related phenomenon lead to extremely thin margins. As Doug at Lead Follow or … notes in one of his posts on comments from an Intel person : Yes Doug, I do. We walked away from a particularly onerous set of T&C.

John at InsideHPC blog has a brief writeup on an article I refrained from commenting on a few days ago. In John’s writeup, he (sarcastically) notes that going private didn’t help LNXI. Last I remember, LNXI was never public, they wanted it to be, but I don’t think they ever hit an IPO. That said, John’s writeup excerpts some of the AP article, with brief comments. My comments on the article are, basically, what took the investors so long?

I had talked briefly about terms and conditions of bids. We strive in the day job, to make sure ours are, shocking as it may be, reasonable. That is, they are not onerous, we don’t put thumbscrews to our customers, we simply ask them to pay on time or pay late fees, and agree to specific things that prevent misunderstandings in the future. We have it in our heads that somehow angering customers is a Bad Thing&tm; This said, you should see some of the RFP T&C; we are asked to agree to.

Rumor has it, on or about 4-April, we should be seeing some new chips. Will try to confirm.

This was, by far, the most painless upgrade of a complex software system I have ever done. That said, I don’t have a coverage test running to make sure everything is working, so please, by all means, kick the tires, make sure it all works.

on /. there is a link to a story on the imminent death of silicon semiconductor as a basis for computing. quoting … These predictions have a history of being wrong. This is not to say that silicon will go on forever. It is an indirect bandgap semiconductor which dissipates some energy as phonons (sound / heat waves in the material, think of hitting an iron bar, and the tones it makes, thats energy you imparted to sound heat in the material).

Way back when, we developed a little scalable app called CT-BLAST, that ran BLAST in parallel on clusters. I had been thinking about re-doing this outside SGI when I first learned of MPI-BLAST some years ago. Since then many folks have tried accelerating BLAST. They do this because BLAST consumes so many cycles. Sadly, BLAST doesn’t seem to drive purchases … That said, some people continue to target this as a core market.

Way way back, long long ago, I used mdbnch benchmark to test machines. I was amazed when SGI’s R8k got this done in under 20 seconds. The sub 15 second R10/R12k results were awesome. The sub 10 second Alpha results were amazing. That was about a decade ago. For a while, Opterons and Xeons have been in the 2-3 second range. Some recent chips were in the 1.4 second range. I always wondered when we would crack one second.

Working through my Gmail account, cleaning things up (monday habit), I get over the the spam box. I don’t like spam. Not to many people I know like spam. Thats spam the mail, not spam the meat. This is important. So I blow away all the spam. And what should appear in the context sensitive advertising above the main text area (tastefully sized, unlike Yahoo mail where the advert is most of the page … cough cough …) but …