Often times, things we say or write about are taken slightly (or massively) out of context, repackaged, and written or spoken about in a different manner that subsumes the original context or intent. Even well meaning people do this. It is all part of the process of forming an opinion, specifically an interpretation of events or speech. One might construe a specific person wrote something they did not. Where am I going with this?

As this is the last day of 2006, many pundits are making bold, or in some case, ridiculous, predictions about the future. Some have even made predictions about the past, a bizarre action to be sure, but one that seems to have happened. Prediction is an art. Some times it goes wrong. Badly wrong. Sometimes good companies make bad decisions based upon bad predictions. This is in part why SGI dropped the Beast and Alien in the late 90’s to hop on board the Itanium express.

/. linked to some predictions for the next year. Three of them pertain to HPC. Before I get into the three predictions, let me point out that predicting events that have already happened is not generally hard. This is important for the first prediction. He indicates that Itanium is on life support, and that HP is trying to get out of its deal with Intel. Apparantly he is not aware that this appears to have already happened.

Now that I have complained aloud about conary, which is the package management bit in rPath, let me praise the idea behind rPath. No, no one prompted me. No nastygrams. My major issue is with Conary, the distribution builder, and the decisions that must have gone into it. Punchline: rPath works, though conary is proving to be more of a pain than RPM, it is even less apparant to me how to build an appliance than I would like it to be, and integrating things we need to integrate in, such as lots of perl modules, lots of other bits, is a non-starter due to the issues in dealing with conary and their distribution build system.

A customer has a JackRabbit. They want to install Scientific Linux 4.4 (SL4.4) on it. Ok. Holding back on the criticism of the positively ancient kernel in RHEL4 derived distributions, its weak NUMA support, and other issues. Lets look at file systems. JackRabbit is a server. A 5U monster that can push tremendous amounts of data around; to disk, from disk, out onto the network. It needs a relatively modern kernel to make best use of its chipsets, which aren’t supported before 2.

PJ over at Groklaw.net is often a fun read. Her commentary on the SCO case has been excellent, if not loaded with biting sarcasm and witty humor. I think that this is good, as SCO deserves the derision heaped upon it for lighting off a case that their overlords appear to have asked for, without checking to see whether or not it was real enough to push. In business as in parenting, you have to learn to pick your fights.

or why is the volume desktop market leader interested in a small market like Supercomputing. I can’t answer that one easily, as the return on their investment will be low. It would behoove any Microsoft shareholder to ask the management team at the annual shareholder meeting why they are going after something so small relative to other more profitable and larger markets. I cannot fathom the business model that they have for this.

I read this article about the state of windows machines in the top500 list of “fastest” supercomputers. Remember that Microsoft indicates that it has no interest in the top500, and given its purported strategy, that sounds like it is correct, that they shouldn’t care about “non-mainstream” supercomputers. Since Microsoft appears to want to make supercomputers appear to be simply big PCs that are out of sight, focusing on top500 doesn’t make much sense.

We have spoken to many customers as of late about storage. Apparantly there is this new high performance physical interconnect akin to the venerable and aging Fibre Channel, SCSI, and other related technologies. Its name? iSCSI. Can you tell whats wrong with this? The customers can’t. And we can blame the marketing hype machines for this situation. iSCSI is new, is quite interesting, and is the right solution for many users.

Ok, so the soap opera title may in fact be appropriate. When the deal was first announced, reading over the press release had me thinking that a good convergence was in order. We were seeing Microsoft finally (correctly) decide that working with Linux was a good thing for it. Then the Microsoft execs opened their mouths. What they managed to do is to give ammunition to all the people in the community opposed to such deals, a large, well … no … a huge bolus of things to be concerned about, and further to give them an unfortunately large platform upon which to (correctly) shout that they were in fact right.