See this PR. Since HP, IBM, etc all support Lustre on their systems (as does my $day job), this should prove to be interesting. Will they keep supporting it, or run away to pNFS? I suspect the latter. Storage clusters are going into overdrive. Storage software is growing rapidly, especially the clustered software. Go figure.

I saw this linked off of /.. Core memory returns, though this core memory is not using magnetization of cores, but motion of cores. Since this is mechanical, I wonder how they are going to protect against shocks sufficient to exceed the coefficient of static friction … not to mention eigen-modes of the long racetrack wires. This should be fun to watch as it develops.икони

I have a desktop box here, 8 cores, 8 GB ram, using it for some development and testing. This is a nice box. Not expensive. Linux on it (OpenSuSE 10.2), and some disk (900GB). All it needs is a good graphics card and it is an awesome workstation. The graphics card I am using now is the motherboard adapter based unit. It is sweet to be doing compiles and simply type “make -j8” and have this puppy crank.

See this link . Not good for ZFS. A day after someone posted an amusing and somewhat contradictory set of reasons why they preferred Sun x4500 to JackRabbit (including the “if a RAID card fails you have to replace it, and this is bad” in close temporal proximity to “the SATA controller failed and we had to replace the motherboard”, with the first offered up as to why JackRabbit was not as good as x4500, and the second as to why x4500 was better … you can read this amusing gem on the beowulf list if you wish …) we see ZFS being attacked on patent grounds.

The market has largely converged on two OSes going forward. Unix demand and sales have been giving way according to IDC and others for the past few years. Linux has been and continues to take market and mind share away from it. Most OEMs realize this. There was a legal battle over this, now preparing for the fat lady with the Viking hat to start belting out her tune. And in a Monty Python-esque manner, one of the combatants says “I’m not dead yet, I think I will go for a walk”.

Barcelona vs Xeon. 2.0 GHz Barcelona vs 2.33 GHz Clovertown. Punchline: SpecFP 78 for Barcelona, 60 for Xeon. Must be an old video. Xeon 5345 is not the highest performing Xeon, that is the 5365 at 3 GHz. About 29% “faster” than the 2.33 GHz version. This should put the 3 GHz Xeon on performance parity with the 2GHz Barcelona. But the Barcelona has a better memory system. And a better internal processor “bus” (yeah, not a bus, but a fabric).

This is useful in various contexts. We keep hearing from various quarters about how well they are doing, “beating” the competition. Well, at the end of the day, its what people do, not what they say that matters. From Supercomputingonline: Ok, lets work a little math: 1.8B$/5.0B$ US is … 0.36 That is the newly purchased Linux server market is 36% the size of the newly purchased windows server market, and growing.

This morning, /. reports Ok, its not their name. Just their ticker symbol. But why? Well their CEO says something here … [wipes monitor from spewed coffee] Quoting Inigo Montoya I make no bones about that I think Java is massively overhyped, overblown. It is a solution looking for a problem from the previous decade, which really didn’t exist back then either. But today we are stuck with its 32 bit legacy.

Some of us have been arguing for a while that the future of HPC is aSMP (asymmetric processing) or heterogeneous processing. Others have argued that the future is massive multicore. In the aSMP world view, there are camps forming between RC (reconfigurable computing) and GPU/Cell-like computing. Here is what is interesting. In an article just posted in HPCWire, an “anonymous” writer, whom in the past has argued the vector case strenuously, makes an extremely good analysis of the issues in front of us.

Over at Accelerated Times, an article was posted about the Tilera. Now I haven’t heard much about Tilera, other than pre-releases. [update: look at the comment here] The author focuses on several important aspects. The business model, the money raise, are they are where they say they are. What strikes me is that if they raised a B-round, this usually … usually happens post initial revenue, when you start to see interest and traction.