I have noticed this now on my laptop, on JackRabbit, on a few other systems. The Ubuntu kernels are thrashing with context switches. 4000-5000 or so per second, and fast machines are rendered sluggish. So we build our own. Did that for Ubuntu thus far, and it has been good. Context switches per second down around 100 or so at idle. Where they should be. I just wonder if anyone at Canonical is paying attention to this.

Just as Linux and HPC on Linux clears the SCO debacle, new FUD from a familiar source. Yup, our buddy is up to his old tricks. Groklaw has the story. Some snippets: Well, yes. Of course. And in the court of public opinion, we see the response. Linux usage is increasing by the per unit data, which doesn’t count reloaded/remissioned systems (we have done several for customers recently, whereby their data will count in the windows column as that is what they shipped with, though they are running Linux now, and this is not counting in any column).

Well, the circus and legal theatre that SCO has created for itself is not quite over yet. Novell appears to be doing something along the lines of what I suggested. I wrote this: And today, I read on an article linked from /. that … or they may run out of Novell’s money, fighting Novell who wants to take possession of Novell’s money. I won’t speculate whether or not this motion would be granted.

On HPCwire this week, John West included a short summary of our annoucement. At least no one has set up a slashdot submission … yet. If I see the server load roll past 1000 I know I have been hit by the /. effect. That and hearing silicon whimper… Hmmm… maybe that is a good benchmark for JR, put it up as a web server, submit a /. and let er rip :)

It seems that the choice in CPU cooling solutions for these two sockets (Opteron/Xeon) is slim at best. I guess they aren’t volume sellers. What I don’t get is why the powers that be sought to invent yet-another-new-cooling-solution-requirement that does a good job of fragmenting the market, and insuring limited supply of reasonable cooling systems. Well, the Intel boxed processors at least come with cpu fans and coolers. As of socket 1207, Opterons no longer do.

I was down at OLF with a JackRabbit and a Pegasus workstation. The rest of the booths had filled up, so they placed us near the coffee. Lets see, coffee, IT people … Hmmm…. They musta liked us ! Some friends helped out getting the mini booth up. I put out some pens, 150 JackRabbit pages (couldn’t possibly burn through those, right? I figured we would get rid of 20 or so at best).

(aka I can buy them in the market …) See Newegg.

I taught the first half of an MPI class for a university last friday. It was fun, I showed them how to engineer an application for maximum scalability, as well as how to do basic message passing. There isn’t a great deal we can do in a single day, but I did start to get into some of the minutae of MPI programming. It is hard for people to think in parallel.

Almost forgot to mention. Our 48 TB unit is now available for under $1/GB (e.g. less than $48k). This is, as far as we know, the densest storage server/appliance available on the market today. See the full product line with pricing data on the JackRabbit site.

Wow… we ran through a pricing update for JackRabbit last week in preparation for several marketing events/shows, and wow … what a difference several months make. Everything (but the chassis) has fallen significantly in price. Which means we were able to lower our prices, significantly. Looking at the gamut, only at the very low end of the offerings, is the pricing greater than $1/GB. Everywhere else, the pricing is less than $1/GB.