John at InsideHPC has a pointer to an article on benchmarks of the chips. There is no doubt that Intel is doing a good job on coming out with chips in a timely manner, something AMD is not doing well. Regardless of my criticism, what is interesting are the real world tests. I don’t care so much about winrar and other things that, generally speaking, won’t impact my or my customers lives all that much.

Doing some gear shifting, I found a link to xkcd. On it, I found this drawing … [ ](http://xkcd.com/54/) [channeling Austin Powers] Yeah baby!

I have been a strong proponent of accelerators for quite some time. Unfortunately, as indicated, it has been sadly, lacking success in trying to convince VCs and others to help fund the development we saw was needed. “The market will be there”, we said. “When” they asked. “Soon” we replied. That wasn’t good enough for them. That was ~2 years ago. Now, free from much of the hype (though marketeers still inject a little every now and then), we see a rapidly developing accelerator marketplace.

From an article in Computerworld.. They note some results reported at a Gartner data center conference recently. Before I go into this, please remember that I am still laughing over the Itanium2 installed base debacle that Gartner had “predicted” in the previous decade (and early part of this decade). So, as with all projections, take theirs with a few kg of salt. What is most interesting is that they give current numbers.

On thanksgiving in the US, there is much to reflect upon. Introspection: what you are doing right, and what you are not, is always good. We do quite a bit of it. Though on Thanksgiving, it is interspersed between the mashed potatoes, turkey, and other elements. HPCwire appeared to do some introspection. Sort of. Their language and adoption of one side of a debate is, well, troubling. They cherry picked from John Power’s blog.

I never met Gene Golub; I have his and Charles Van Loan’s “Matrix Computations” book. It is one of those that you pour over, sometimes scratching your head as to how a particular algorithm works, and there is a detailed discussion of how to implement the algorithm, including very helpful discussions of the inner workings. The book is extraordinary, you can almost hear the lecture proceeding as you read it. It is accessible, and largely comprehensible.

Sadly I missed John West and the InsideHPC folks at Reno. This was my fault, it was my intention to drop by and say hi. I read InsideHPC and a few others frequently. Turns out, not frequently enough, as he noted something from the San Jose Mercury News on SGI. Its “old” news now (more than 24 hours), but an SGI shareholder is pushing for a sale to a competitor. The rationale for this is to reduce the SG&A; costs.

Next year in Austin … looking forward to it. This year was muted relative to previous years. Some high fliers of the past were absent: I didn’t see Apple, I suspect they have decided that margins on iPhone and iTunes is simply better for them than getting in pitched battles for clusters. They haven’t had much in the way of success/installed base there. Linux Networx wasn’t there in a meaningful way (some people may have been in the whisper suites).

Well, for day 2 had very little in the way of looking at demos. It was a day of meetings. That and a BOF. Ok, I did get to see the D-Wave systems stuff and ask some questions. It is not precisely what I thought it was. In short, they map problems onto an Ising model, and then cool the chip. The mapping onto the Ising model may be understood in terms of constraints on the “spin” state of the model.