The Register reports that Microsoft is uh… yeah. This whole thing bothers me. Because it means that Microsoft is implying that anyone in HPC using Linux is a thief, stealing and using Microsoft intellectual property without paying Microsoft for the privilege. Neat strategy. “Use our stuff and we won’t sue”. I can’t believe that I am the only one that finds this offensive. Somewhat more odious than their initial marketing message of “now HPC is mainstream.

I like the intel compilers. The generate nice code on intel platforms. The problem is when you use them for your product, you only get good code for intel platforms. The resulting code winds up being slow in many cases on Opterons. Which is not good. I have been talking about this point for a while. There are hacks you can use with your intel generated code to take out the specific processor test cases, and just run them on opterons, and surprise, they run often better than without those hacks.

I have been touching on some of the aspects of this in various posts here recently. Basically you have 2 roughly related technologies to work with today. Shared memory (OpenMP) and distributed memory (MPI). Sure there are others, but these dominate. But there is a problem with these. In the case of OpenMP, you annotate your source, and the compiler does the work. But it only does the work assuming you have a shared memory system.

What a day for 10GbE. Ask a question. Get a few answers. Inexpensive NICs are good. So are inexpensive switches. Have a look at Woven systems.

I asked earlier today where the 10GbE was, noting that NICs were horribly expensive, and switches were bad as well. Well, I just read this which suggests the Mellanox will be sourcing chips to builders for reasonable pricing. Now only if CX-4 weren’t so expensive …

Over at Digital Tipping Point we see something quite interesting. The blog author has set up a list for people to sign up to be sued by Microsoft for patent infringement. Now you might think I mean “backfire” as in these people are nuts. This is not what I mean. What I mean is that the patent threats have managed to open up a whole new front, one that has surprised me, as I did not think of it.

For quite a while, we have been hearing about how great 10GbE is. I like the idea, it is just ethernet. Plug it in (with CX-4 … ) and off you go. There is only a small number of flys in this particular ointment. Cost: Per port costs of 10GbE are huge. The NICs are running in the thousands of USD ($), and the switches … well … lets not go there.

Loaded it on two “desktop” systems for a customer evaluation. Well these are desktops in name only. Smaller than the other ferocious beasts we finished building last week, but still … The small ones are a dual dual-core Opteron 2220 system with 8 GB ram, and 1 TB of fast disk, and a dual quad core Clovertown 5310 unit with 8 GB ram, and 1 TB of fast disk. Only differences were processor, motherboard, and RAM type, the rest of the specs were the same.

Lots of people called this for what it was. FUD. Pure and simple. Marketing by threatened litigation. This evening, information-week posted more discussion, including Linus Torvalds viewpoint. Not so oddly enough, his view was quite similar with my thoughts. That wasn’t what struck me. It was the backpedaling. My thoughts are, simply put, what utter hogwash. Their comments were a carefully prepared shot across the bow. It was meant to have marketing impact.

This morning, more “coverage” (being generous here). First USA Today tells us that “Microsoft details patent breaches." This seems to be a new definition of the word “detail”, one that I am not quite familiar with. Detail usually means “extended treatment of or attention to particular items”. The definition of detail for the USA today piece appears to be different. No details on patents. Just “counts”. Moreover, the article indicates that