Ok … I am … well … blown away. I had thought Perl6 would be the Duke Nukem forever of programming languages. Indeed, it has been in active development for more than a decade. But you can download compilers (yes, you heard me right, compilers) for it now. You might say “why perl” or “why perl6” or “why now, because we have #insert(language_x) and its wonderful”. Good question, I wasn’t sure why it was relevant, until I started reading some of the code.

Simple test case, no file system … using raw devices, what can I push out to all 60 drives in 128k chunks. Actually this is part of our burn-in test series, I am looking for failures/performance anomalies. ----total-cpu-usage---- -dsk/total- -net/total- ---paging-- ---system-- usr sys idl wai hiq siq| read writ| recv send| in out | int csw 0 1 95 5 0 0| 513M 0 | 480B 0 | 0 0 | 10k 20k 4 2 94 0 0 0| 0 0 | 480B 0 | 0 0 |5238 721 0 2 98 0 0 0| 0 0 | 480B 0 | 0 0 |4913 352 0 2 98 0 0 0| 0 0 | 570B 90B| 0 0 |4966 613 0 2 98 0 0 0| 0 0 | 480B 0 | 0 0 |4912 413 0 2 98 0 0 0| 0 0 | 584B 92B| 0 0 |4965 334 0 2 98 0 0 0| 0 0 | 480B 0 | 0 0 |4914 306 0 2 98 0 0 0| 0 0 | 636B 147B| 0 0 |4969 483 0 2 98 0 0 0| 0 0 | 570B 0 | 0 0 |4915 377 8 8 50 32 0 2|7520k 8382M| 578B 0 | 0 0 | 76k 215k 9 7 30 52 0 3|8332k 12G| 960B 132B| 0 0 | 109k 279k 10 5 29 53 0 2|4136k 12G| 240B 0 | 0 0 | 109k 277k 12 6 29 51 0 2|4208k 12G| 240B 0 | 0 0 | 108k 280k 11 6 31 50 0 2|2244k 12G| 330B 90B| 0 0 | 109k 281k 11 6 30 50 0 3|2272k 13G| 240B 0 | 0 0 | 110k 281k Writes around 12.

WD/HGST just released details on a PMR (aka “real”, non-archive class) hard disk. You can read the specs here. We will be offering these in Unison HPC storage systems, to provide up to 600TB/4U unit, or up to 6PB per rack of 10 unison chassis. Coupled with our 100Gb fabric, we expect to be able to drive about 8-9 GB/s per chassis. And thats before we leverage the distributed journaling/metadata NVMe’s rear mounted on the units.

Oh no … we didn’t say “face melting” … did we? Oh. Yes. We. Did. The interview is here at the always wonderful InsideHPC.com You can see the video itself here on YouTube, but read Rich’s transcript. I was losing my voice, and he captured all of the interview in text. Take home messages: Insane IO/Networking/processing performance, small footprint, tiny price, available for orders now.

In Feb 2013, I opined (with some measure of disgust) that people were looking at various software packages as silver bullets, these magical bits of a stack which could suddenly transform massive steaming piles of bits (big … uh … “data” ?) into golden nuggets of actionable data. Many of the “solutions” marketed these days are exactly like that … “add our magic bean software to your pipeline and you will gain insight faster.

So here I am, the day before thanksgiving, fighting a battle with a reluctant license server that wants to compute a hash of internal bits on a machine, in order to use to unlock a license key, to let software run. This is not for us, but for a customer. At their site. This is the same model from the 1980s and early 90s. Create a hash from a collection of things (or a dongle you attach to a serial/parallel port).

As seen here. I like the enTANGOeled photons. Not sure how I’d do mine, but its at least amusing to think through.

Brendan Gregg’s writings are always interesting and informative. I just saw a link on hacker news to a presentation he gave on “Broken Performance Tools”. It is wonderful, and succinctly explains many thing I’ve talked about here and elsewhere, but it goes far beyond what I’ve grumbled over. One of my favorite points in there is slide 83. “Most popular benchmarks are flawed” and a pointer to a paper (easy to google for).

Forte has uncloaked, website is being updated. You can email me (landman@scalableinformatics.com) for more info. Pictures speak louder than words. Have a look. That is 20+ GB/s for streaming sequential IO. Then, 4kB random reads … That is, 5+ Million IOPs. Specs include Price point for this is $50k for 48TB, $1/GB. Pre-order now, shipping in a few weeks.

Assuming everything goes as planned (HA!) we should have a number of very cool things at SC15. * 100Gb [Unison storage system with BeeGFS](https://scalableinformatics.com/unison) * 100Gb [Unison Ceph](https://scalableinformatics.com/unison) system * 100Gb connection to a partner/customer booth * Forte 100Gb is awesome. The first time I ran an iperf bidirectional test, saw 20GB/s … it blew me away. 40/56GbE is old hat now, and 10GbE is in the rapidly receding past.