John West has a good article on a phenomenon in HPC. Generally speaking there is a disconnect between chip vendors and final customers. This disconnect often means that high performance computing solutions vendor (like my day job) often have to deal with … well … interesting and exciting problems, in supply, quality, and so on. John talks about this with respect to chip vendors, but his analysis also applies to motherboard vendors, ram makers, disk vendors, and so on.

IPMI is (sometimes) a wonderful thing. It can help you figure out problems, provide a console over network capability, as well as power cycle machines. This is of course, when it works. When it doesn’t, it is a nightmare. We have a cluster in place with a mostly functional IPMI stack. Customer indicated a problem with a node, and we brought it back to the lab. Turns out that during a recent move of theirs, they damaged a port on it.

Over at Linux Magazine, they have a multi-core cookbook. This is a site dedicated to pragmatic HPC topics … more than just HPC, as everyone has to deal with multi-core these days. The question is how to program them. I wrote an article (well first of three, two written and submitted, third one I am still working on) on how to use OpenMP. This is pragmatic in that it show you how to go from a bare linux machine to openMP enabled in a short period of time.

That bastion of accurate reporting, Valleywag, has a short note on AMD taking a charge for the ATI acquiisition. Quite a few of us questioned the wisdom of the move at the time. nVidia would have made more sense, but given the market caps, it would have been nVidia acquiring AMD, and that isn’t likely to have happened. Well, as John at InsideHPC reported earlier in the week, AMD was not exactly rolling in the good news over the past two weeks.

We have been pointing out for a long while that the HPC market is growing at a break-neck pace. The latest IDC numbers, continue to support these claims. Many places have the numbers and the analysis. Pointing toHPCwire’s analysis: Yeah, that about sums it up. Now remember, that Linux is the most common and largest fraction of the HPC server market, and despite protestations (and marketing) to the contrary from interested parties, this shows no signs of letting up, or changing in any significant way.

It is becoming clearer and clearer that we aren’t the only ones calling on AMD to do something about the Barcelona issue. AMD has too much invested in the system to be acting the way it is, damaging its relationship the way it is. Some of the others are simply suggesting a fessing up to the situation, as it appears that spokes people are trying to spin something hard. [**update: **the register has a take] No.

First off, it is worth noting that the handling of the problem is causing far more damage to AMD than the problem would … investment types call it loss of goodwill. This is the indication of something like a rudderless ship in motion. It needs to be corrected forthwith. Like yesterday. AMD needs to * Make the patch available on its website * Hire some contractors to make patches for RHEL/SuSE/Ubuntu, as well as source code installable packages which will build against the kernel * Lose the warranty hole.

From /., I saw an article on non-competes. It made the claim that they are the DRM of human capital. DRM is, for all intents and purposes, digital rights management, which is post sales control over assets. Human capital is a euphemism of course, for people … knowledge workers specifically (which is itself a euphemism … ) What struck me (as a Michigander of about 2 decades now) was this snippet:

I spoke with the AMD folks during SC and afterwords. Someone leaked the info yesterday, and today on the x86_64 discussion group, the errata and patches were detailed. I have had the patches for a few days now, and have a bios update I need to apply to a motherboard. That said, what this is, is a particular TLB-cache interaction, that under a very specific set of circumstances, will trigger a machine check exception, and hang a machine.

Check out Doug Eadline’s MultiCore Cookbook at Linux Magazine. Kudos to LM for continuing efforts to promote all manner of relevant articles. Sadly, some web publications may call this “zealotry” or similar, but as Linux continues to dominate HPC, and HPC does in fact continue to grow at a blistering pace, it appears that LM is one of the very small number of publications of record focusing upon HPC for end users.