Have a look at Accelerated Times.

(relevance to HPC: some of the companies that effectively bankrolled this effort have been trying to leverage it against Linux, in the HPC space, and have managed to cause customers confusion. ..) Can’t get any more cliche' than that. /. links to an arstechnica article on SCO. Turns out the ruling knocked out any pillar of hope for thie rapidly fading company. Their only real hope now is for a white knight.

This is a very short missive about Java. I am tired of a complete lack of official 64 bit support for Java in browsers. Then again, using Java in your browser is a pretty sure way to crash your browser. It certainly makes fast systems slow, and slow systems unusable. I think it is time we all took Nancy Reagan’s advice, and “just say no” to Java. Its waaaaay past time.

I mean really, pre pre pre … pre alpha. Did I mention that it is pre pre pre … pre alpha? Takes flight here. Still a ways to go. RIP SICE. Update: DragonFly is our next gen user interface for clusters. SICE is our previous gen, it had been around for years, and was long in the tooth. DragonFly will be dual licensed, and as soon as we get all the hooks together, we will release code.

Amir at Reconfigurable Computing Blog (welcome back Amir!) notes We have been making the arguments (and pitching) accelerated computing for years. Almost half a decade. Scary. We see in other peoples marketing materials, pitches, etc things we have said years ago. In one particularly egregious example, a potential competitor had some of our slides in their online presentation. Makes you really love to deal with “no-NDA” VCs. I agree with Amir that the meme has been catching on for a while.

Why do we blog, and why do we read blogs, and what does what we read and write say about who we are, what we think, and how we act? Robin at Storagemojo (great blog) talks about the nuances of corporate blogging, and shows some stuff from IBM on the policies of blogging, as well as some stuff from an informal EMC blogger. This is interesting, and as Robin points out, the IBM policy has a particularly valuable set of guidelines.

(the above is an attempt at putting into text, what the character “Porky Pig” says when he wraps up a short cartoon) Apparently SCO is now, quite officially, down for the count, and the count has begun in earnest. According to PJ at Groklaw, we see That is almost all she wrote. The proverbial fat lady is warming up and will be coming on stage soon. SCO claimed that Linux infringed upon the code it claimed owned, and was copied.

NSF formally announced their awards which other had hinted at over the past few weeks. These machines will be “500x faster than todays supercomputers”. How this will occur in 5 years, is well, not know. Moore’s law (if it holds) gives us an order of magnitude in 5.5 years or so. So thats 50x faster than Moore’s law following units. Your options here are a) make more of them, or b) make em faster.

… or how to bring a really fast desktop to its knees. I have desktop unit with Windows XP pro on it. It is my primary windows xp box. It is a nice 2+ GHz Athlon 64 with 1.5 GB ram. Pretty fast SATA disks. Single core, but quite fast. Or so I thought. I like to listen to internet radio while I work. Helps drown out the server noise. So I have winamp in a corner, playing something at low volume.

Yesterday I told you that we were under a mail-bomb DDoS. Message rates of about 147 per minute. As our normal rate is 1-2 messages per minute, this was a 100x or more increase. Not against our normal domain name, but against one that we host. One that doesn’t have a web site. And has one email user. Obviously the people who did this are really, terribly smart. Oh yes. (keyboard dripping with sarcasm).