Names not mentioned to protect the guilty. So I am working on a cluster load. Have everything nicely configured. Do some tests, make sure it takes correctly. I have spent many an hour dealing with some sort of broken process, due to minor changes in seemingly unrelated areas. Usually broken due to badly borked installers that, for better or worse (usually worse) are considered “standard.” This is the N+1th test. We have customers who like installing and re-installing.

I have been pointing out for some time that disk manufacturing processes and hardware are pretty much identical across all types of disk. There is nothing of significance different between the hardware in a SCSI, FC, or SATA drive, outside the drive electronics package. One of the side effects of this would be effectively indistinguishable failure rates between the hardware. Of course, all these vendors publish MTBF, and other numbers which are “measured”.

This is a modified version of a previous posting. We agreed to rewrite this post, eliding mention of a report we had taken issue with, and why we had taken issue with it. We will report JackRabbit benchmark data as we have measured it on our original system. Updated benchmark data, run files, and so on will be available from our site as soon as possible. IOzone benchmarks were run and the results plotted.

Only 1.2TF performance. Ok, I am officially impressed. The immediate questions are a) can anyone actually program it b) how hard do you have to work to feed this monster? Data motion is hard. Very hard. You have fixed sized pipes. You see contention at dual core, and quad, as Clovertown shows, is not appropriate for memory bound codes on fixed/limited width memory pipes. Regardless of those (not so minor) issues, all I can say is “wow” and good job Intel.

Saw this on /.. Jeremy’s major problem was the patent cross license. My problem was not that. I had indicated that if this were a reasonable deal, then both companies would be talking about expanded capabilities, better interop, and all sorts of things. One company was talking that way. Novell. One company was talking about “unaccounted for balance sheet liabilities”. Also known as FUD. Specifically he articulated: Yeah… he noticed that too.

I saw a post linked from Ken Farmers excellent LinuxHPC.org site. In it the author leads with a title of “Grid computing being doomed.” Ok … Reading further, it seems that the conception of what Grid computing is has morphed a bit. With the rise of the SaaS fad (long term fad, unless it can show real demonstratable ROI for everyday apps) and VC’s pouring money into this willy-nilly, it turns out that “Grid” is no longer fashionable for VCs.

Ok, well, not quite. But apparently the folks over at D-Wave have a quantum computer about to be shown solving a real problem. Talk about accelerated computing … They are somewhat flippant about pointing out that this is an NP problem solver. So if we have some little NP problem, like, I dunno, Ising models in the presence of a magnetic field, this thing ought to be able to solve it.

Yup, as if it should surprise anyone. PBL from Spamhaus.org. Somehow they decided that our mail system is not allowed to send mail. I have grown tired of this. 3 weeks ago we defended against a huge DDoS without using a single RBL. In fact, had we used an RBL, the traffic against that server (they use DNS like records) would have been assumed to be a DDoS on our part against them.

post removed, content edited, and put at http://www.scalability.org?p=209 . For information on JackRabbit, see http://jackrabbit.scalableinformatics.com .

Deepak over at MNDoci links to Guy Kawasaki’s blog. I browsed through it and found this post. Basically it questions whether or not a formally constructed business plan is needed. Ok, this is an oversimplification. The basic idea is that you need to be able to communicate your ideas concisely, to be able to convince others that the ideas have merit, and that you have more than a snowballs chance on a sunny July afternoon in Florida of actually making it work.