Well, we seem to not have been the only ones to notice the problems with the arguments made by Microsoft legal. Larry Augustin, of VA Linux fame, wrote a response that is worth reading. In it he basically says “put them up (the allegedly infringed patents, and where the infringing code/design is), or shut up.” The critical “money” quote is That is the point after all. Super-secret evidence. Reminds me of the Animal House movie.

Here we are in the age of the cluster and grid, with distributed shared nothing approaches to processing cycles, and we collectively have this rather ironic fixation on shared file systems. This is amusing as one of the critical arguments for distributed computing is that, in aggregate, N processors provides N times the number of processing cycles that 1 processor can provide, and shared resources are contended for resources (e.g. bottlenecks).

What do you do when a competitor encroaches upon your cash cows, starts usurping deals, demonstrates unbeatable TCO, infinitely better acquisition cost, better security and resilience to attacks? You FUD them of course. FUD being the act of creating Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt about them. Say, for example, dangling the possibility of lawsuits against users of the competitors products. Scare your customers, scare their customers. And how do you do this?

Our mkchbond.pl script automates the creation of channel bond entries in Redhat and now SuSE Linux. Its primary reason for existing is to automate a process that is editing intensive, and somewhat annoying. It also provides dry runs by default, you have to tell it to –write a file before it will touch anything. For example: to create a 4 way channel bond named bond0 out of eth2, eth3, eth4, eth5, with an IP address of the bond as 192.

Have a look at this link. We have pointed out that Microsoft has had a great opportunity to a) do the right thing, b) do it in a multiplatform manner. Would make lots of customers/end users happy. Lower barriers and all that. Unfortunately, I am not sure Microsoft quite grasps that this is why clusters are so powerful, or why Open Source is so widely used. Its all about the barriers, and getting around them.

Having spoken with quite a number of potential/current customers on this topic, we had been assured that end users were largely disinterested in expensive single point-function computing devices. They wanted inexpensive, and fast, and reusable for other things. 10x current platform performance for well under 10k$US was what really stuck out in our responses to inquiries. Of course, this was over the last several years, and you get 10x from Moore’s law advances every 5-6 years, so you can always just wait.

I have been wanting to get CCS adoption data. It helps us understand whether this is a viable target for software development, and whether or not we want to invest limited resources in it. We had been asked previously by Microsoft to “benchmark” applications, though they seem to have missed our point about porting the applications to run fast natively before we benchmark. Regardless, we want to see if others have been adopting the platform.

Spring is almost here … in Michigan. Its not cold enough to snow, but not warm enough for trees and plants to bloom. That means that it is time for rabbits to go forth and multiply. With this in mind, in honor of the new product offering, Scalable Informatics JackRabbit 24 TB storage systems are available from Scalable Informatics and partners for $23,830. This is less than $1/GB for a system demonstrating more than 1 GB/s performance on standard IO test cases.

Have a look here. Performance is excellent. [ ](http://scalability.org/images/JR-benchmark-picture.jpg)

We worked on this white paper back at the end of December for AMD. We have significant data that goes along with it, very interesting data, that shows nicely that software and software+hardware accelerated applications can scale. The white paper is here or you can pull it from the AMD site. [ ](http://www.scalableinformatics.com/public/AccComp_WP.pdf) There are a few editing mistakes in it, but apart from that, it is an overview of acceleration as it exists today.