On windows clusters. They quote Don Becker, cluster illuminati, who made some quite pointed and correct observations. They quoted some marketing types from other organizations who don’t appear to be technical, and don’t grasp what “hard to install” actually means. Aside from that, one of the least painful aspects of a cluster is “how hard it is to install”. The most painful is the cost of running it, specifically managing users, and applications.

or mine as it turns out. Found this via a link from Google Scholar. I was looking for the HMMer acceleration paper, specifically to see if it had been cited, and found my thesis. The HPC connection has to do with the amount of simulation that went into the calculations. Way back in the good old days, 64 atom supercells took 1 week for 100 time steps on the machines we had (borrowed SGI R3000’s).

Grab the tarball from the open fabrics alliance (or from here) Grab the build_new.sh from here, place it in the OFED-1.2 directory as root on your machine mv /usr/src/linux-2.6.18.2-34/include/linux/miscdevice.h /usr/src/linux-2.6.18.2-34/include/linux/miscdevice.h.original ln -s /usr/include/linux/miscdevice.h /usr/src/linux-2.6.18.2-34/include/linux/miscdevice.h Then run the build_new.sh. Voila. Works. Binary RPMs are here.

Suppose you have a x86_64 box, I dunno, able to put 8+TB usable in 3U. Suppose you want to load OpenSuSE 10.2 on it. Suppose you want to keep the partitioning simple, and not do any fancy tricks to eek out another few percentage of performance, so you build your RAID6 with 2 hot spares. Now you have this big hunk-a-chunk-a disk. Now install OpenSuSE 10.2 on it. After you are done you discover ….

Again, coming back to this, adoption rates are critical. I appreciate Patrick’s point from post 306 that Microsoft doesn’t release this data. In reading around Ken Farmer’s excellent www.winhpc.org site (sister to his excellent www.linuxhpc.org) site, I found a link to this article. I recommend reading the whole thing. Especially page 2. Here is a quote. The next portion of that paragraph is not something I understand. Uh, sure. Not clear on what this means.

What would be “game changing” for you in your storage? That is, what would enable you to do things, or think of things in a completely different way if only X was true? What is X? The reason I ask this is that in short order, the Seagate 1TB drives are going to be out. I want to know if anyone thinks that this density of drive is game changing. 1000 of these drives is 1PB.

As I have pointed out before, without real adoption data, it is hard to gauge whether customers are really interested in a particular platform. We know server adoption data for Linux with reasonable accuracy. At last glance it is large, and rapidly growing, outpacing the market growth, and its rivals growth. This tends to have secondary effects, on to those in a moment. We do not know desktop usage growth across the market in any detail.

in beta form. Tiburon is the open source based framework we are using to load our clusters: computing and storage, and provide modular interfaces to manage the systems. Basically if you are deploying more then 2 nodes, or two JackRabbits, you should not, ever, have to load each system and configure it. This should be automated. But done so in an intelligent manner. And this is where I am thinking that the compute job ASL might have an analog in a management ASL.

We have had a number of discussions with customers on X-RAID and related systems from Apple. Apple pioneered good low cost storage. Wasn’t terribly fast, but it came in around $2-3/GB or so. Last I priced something out for a customer it was ballpark of $2.75/GB. FWIW: JackRabbit is in the low $1.x/GB. I haven’t heard much new about X-RAID recently. Then a blog I like reading had a post about iPhone.

Marc Andreessen (you should have an idea who he is if you have used a web browser at some point in your life) has an excellent post on his blog discussing the “why we are here” situation. Specific to VC and their investments. Well worth a read. Between this and TheFunded, some overall good reading for prospective, current, and former entrepreneurs, wondering, aloud sometimes in blogs, WTF …