About two years ago, we were “invited” to pitch our business and plans to a local VC event. This was good, we were in the hunt for capital, and getting in front of lots of VC’s isn’t a bad idea. Well the “invited” part is in scare quotes, we had to compete with our executive summary. Ok, so we made it past the initial “competition” (hmmm notice the scare quotes). We had to prepare our slides, our talks and some documents.

and it isn’t necessarily all positive. Well, ok, not on the acquisition, but on the current state of affairs prior to the acquisition. This is the interesting aspect of this. Sun is being viewed as a way to save MySQL. Don MacAskill of smugmug has some interesting comments. Quoting Don: The Laura to which he refers is Laura Thompson, and her blog, tech ramblings. The particular post discusses some of the issues.

Well, we now have a mailing list and a repository up in addition to the main page. There are some binary RPMs available. My question to the teaming masses of mpiHMMer users (current or future), what platforms/architectures/OSes are you interested in binary builds for? And support for? Please either answer in a response to this or on the mailing list. This would be quite helpful to know going forward.

So Sun continues their buying spree. First with CFS, and now Mysql. This is quite relevant to HPC for a variety of reasons. Customers have been telling me that they are quite worried about Lustre as a result of the Sun acquisition. There is a lot of speculation about its (likely) limited future outside of Solaris. Then there is ZFS, the sort of - kind of - open source file system that is sort of - kind of - better than anything else.

This is too funny. This is the way it should be done … cudos to Biorad (and maybe I can figure out a way to get these guys to use some JackRabbits … not for amplification, but for storing the data …)

Haven’t updated this in a while. Done lots of code/function clean up. Still have more to do, but to get it to a usable beta state is very much closer than it was a month ago. Lots of items are working … in a cool web 2.0 ajaxy sorta kinda way. And if we did it right, it gracefully degrades to average everyday HTML in the event that you want to shun javascript (sometimes a good idea in and of itself).

There are many reasons. Some economic and TCO, some performance, some development, some stability. Well, that last one is interesting. We hear occasionally about systems stability, ability to withstand withering loads, ability to function and multifunction with ease. The machine that this blog has been running on, shared with multiple other websites, and other functions, is running Linux. Patches relevant for its functionality have been applied with none of the “you must reboot now” garbage that other OSes impose.

Robin Harris noted that he might have misinterpreted what happened. There is a blog which explains it here. Yes, Robin is correct, Microsoft does inspire strong reactions. Allow me to be blunt about it and say not all of them are deserved. The HPC people I have met and spoken with are good people. I don’t agree about some of their directions, but the vision is cool, and it looks correct.

We haven’t covered CS education as such in this blog, as rather surprisingly, most of high performance computing is not being done/driven by CS people. This is probably unfortunate for several reasons, most of which is that many HPC practitioners are taking localized utilitarian views of HPC, and not looking at bigger pictures which may net them additional benefit. That said, the authors of this article imply that the state of CS education is in decline, that CS departments are not creating the computer scientists we need, rather they are creating java programmers, and others well insulated from a deeper understanding of the machine.

I am going to have to look up the article referred to by /. This morning, they linked to an article in AMS about crystal symmetry, and a structure they called K_4. This structure, they claimed, does not occur in nature. Odd I thought … as the picture they showed, well, I thought I had seen it before. So using Inventor, I pulled out an old copy of a Gallium Arsenide lattice I used for simulations, more than a decade ago (aren’t open formats nice?