I am a strong proponent of APUs, and accelerators in general. It is fairly obvious that the explosion in cores on single sockets results in a bandwidth wall, that we have to work around. The reason for many more cores, and for SSE and other techniques is fundamentally to increase the number of processor cycles available per unit time. SSE attempts to increase the efficiency of these cycles by allowing them to do more work per unit time.

As reported on HPCWire. Major features: * Server portion of the market is $11.6B growing 15.5% CAGR * Over 5 years (2002-2007) the HPC server market has grown 134%, and is projected to reach $15B by 2011 What is interesting is that some of the markets grew in different ways than in the past. * The larger systems (>$500k) grew at 24% year-over-year to $3.2B. * Divisional systems ($250-499k) grew 19% to $1.

[Queue scary music] [ ](/images/they-are-back.png) Ok, firewall rules turned on again. Hey DoSer … this gets old. We are blocking all mail from .isp.att.net and dnsvr.com. Feel free to do the same. Update: Firewall rules on, DoSer goes buh-bye. Folks, we need to have zero tolerance for this behavior. Bug me offline if you want to see our blocklist for them.

I have noticed something recently. Others have noticed it as well. It is hard to find talent in Linux and OSS technologies. Now before the crowds of gleeful non-OSS companies get on a marketing roll here, and quote me out of context (gee, like that’s never happened), it is worth asking the question “why”. It’s not because they aren’t out there. No. There are lots. It is because most of the ones I have spoken to to try to offload us, are themselves overloaded and busy.

… that people don’t know about your products. Robin at StorageMojo reported on the death of Apple’s Xserve/Xraid unit. He noted … then asked We can quote 24, 36, and 48 TB chunks, all under $1/GB. I left a note in his comments, and I hope it wasn’t inappropriate; just a short informational pointer. This shows that we have lots more work to do to get the message out. For those who didn’t see, we sustained 1.

As I noted recently in the post on SGI, they are having a tough time of it, in large part due to who they are competing against, and what they have to use to compete with. Well, they aren’t the only company with issues. As noted on InsideHPC and elsewhere, ClearSpeed is not having a great time of it either. [ ](http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=CSD.L&t=2y&l=on&z=m&q=l&c=) Basically ClearSpeed makes accelerated CPUs. Each CPU has 96 cores layed out in a systolic array.

As InsideHPC reports, Cray has nailed a large DoD contract. Good for Cray. Sadly they did report not that great earnings recently, and some publications have been beating on them a bit. Cray is a good company. They have vision, and solid products. They are differentiated. They are not the low end of the market, though with a little work, I bet they could address it (and do so within their vision).

John at the always interesting InsideHPCasks a very important question, that, oddly, I think I can answer. The overall article is on the SGI salvage of LNXI assets. John’s question was They are not. You can see it quite clearly on the financial charts [ ](http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=SGIC&t=2y&l=on&z=m&q=l&c=) The company’s stats can be read from the Yahoo page, go ahead and click the picture and you can see it. Their market cap is less than $200M.

root@pegasus-i:~# mdadm –create /dev/md0 –level=0 –raid-devices=2 /dev/sdc /dev/sdd mdadm: array /dev/md0 started. root@pegasus-i:~# cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [linear] [multipath] [raid0] [raid1] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [raid10] md0 : active raid0 sdd[1] sdc[0] 9765425152 blocks root@pegasus-i:~# mkfs.ext3 /dev/md0 mke2fs 1.40.2 (12-Jul-2007) mkfs.ext3: Filesystem too large. No more than 2**31-1 blocks (8TB using a blocksize of 4k) are currently supported. Stick a fork in it … its done.

Simple-write/read show 450-550 MB/s to real disk. Bonnie++ … ` [root@pegasus-i io-bm]# bonnie++ -u root -d /big/ -f Using uid:0, gid:0. Writing intelligently...done Rewriting...done Reading intelligently...done start 'em...done...done...done... Create files in sequential order...done. Stat files in sequential order...done. Delete files in sequential order...done. Create files in random order...done. Stat files in random order...done. Delete files in random order...done. Version 1.03 ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random- -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks-- Machine Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP /sec %CP pegasus-i 24008M 515250 88 246596 62 409339 90 254.