let me know if it breaks anything …

I use Linux on my laptop. Have for years. Use lots of business tools there. Browse web pages with firefox, get email with thunderbird. Create, modify, finalize, present “office” documents (Excel spreadsheets, powerpoint presentations, Word documents). Watch video clips (legal), DVDs (legal), etc. It makes for a great platform for these things. Stable, fast, virus free. One of my big complaints about dealing with web pages has been the propensity to code to IE-whatever.

Surface computing. I can see uses for this, in HPC and analytics, not to mention tele/remote medicine, science/engineering … Kudos to Microsoft. This should be quite cool.

still not behaving with Ubuntu 7.04 or 6.10. In 6.10, at least it gets the nfs-premount scripts, and then tries (and fails, due to a missing colon) the /root directory from the NFS server. Reminds me of the autoinst days of long past. Took a while to figure out how to get Irix booted diskless, but once that happened and I could do it reliably, the rest was easy…. er … yeah… easy.

Our systems install via PXE boot whenever possible. Much faster than DVD/CD, floppies and alike. I have been fighting with PXELINUX (part of the excellent SYSLINUX package of boot loaders with menus) trying to get it working the way I want it to. This is important for JackRabbit and our compute clusters. Of course I was using the native SYSLINUX package, something around version 2.09 or something like that. I had pxegrub loading, but then it would basically hang while working with the network.

A point I try to make to customers at the day job is that, as you scale up a systems size, your design will need to scale as well. And this begs the question. How will it need to change? Currently (May 2007) simple NFS suffers from 1/N problems (1/N meaning that as the average number of requesters N increases, the average available fixed resource available per requester works out to about 1/N … modulo duty cycles, transients, etc).

Ok, it hit me today. I know what I want, or at least in part, in a language. I do not want to write loops. I want to write something like this: range: i=1 .. N; a[i] = b[i]+c*d[i]; You don’t see any explicit “for” loops. No explicit control structures. The rationale I have for this is that without an explicit set of control structures, the compiler is freer to transform the code to match the underlying machine architecture.

Michael Suess over at the always interesting Thinking Parallel blog wrote a number of interesting pieces recently. I would suggest a trip over there to read some of them. I must thank him at some point for pointing to us as part of his “you are what you read” post. We aren’t on an anti-Microsoft spree, and I am not trying to “kill” them. I am being skeptical about their motives, and noting that there are alternative and simpler explanations for their actions.

This is not about HPC. I look at our logs every now and then to see if we have problems which aren’t normally covered in monitoring scenarios. Looking over the web logs, I see the usual usage, and bots. Some bots have been poorly behaved, some are quite intelligent. Google’s are pretty good. So are many of the others. A group of them are very poor web-denizens, who seem to be incapable of understanding the links they see, and blindly follow them.

From John West’s InsideHPC blog I found a link to a link to a paper on a Microsoft site. This paper starts out with lofty goals Sounds great, they are going to teach us a set of best practices for HPC. Cool. I like learning new things, so this should be helpful. They continue a little later on … Hmmm… If they think HPC is all about solutions can be used to crunch complex mathematical problems in a variety of area, then we have a problem.