Why 3 parts? Well why do two when a third is just 50% more … The universities: are out in force. Excellent stuff. If you get a chance, go by the SUNY Buffalo booth (UB booth) and pick up the MPI-HMMer page. JP and Vipin have worked hard on this code, and they deserve serious kudos it. Many more things to talk about, more tomorrow. With regards to the Microsoft dinner, I do regret missing this.

Why 2 parts? It seems that in posting blogs from hotel rooms, they may somehow limit the amount you can upload to a web site. Not sure why, but it fails to work while here, though it works great elsewhere. The point about making more power open to wider groups of people, and more accessible to larger groups of people is critical. Driving the computing to the desktop, though there was, how shall I put this, spirited discussion, about whether a “cluster under the desktop” made sense, the message is clear.

First off, I missed the very thing I was most looking forward to, in large part due to getting caught up in a great BoF, run by a friend and former colleague. This was my fault, I had fully intended to have dinner with the Microsoft team. My apologies to them and to the other guests. More about this a little later. I am uploading pictures/photos/movies, including about 15 minutes of Ray Kurzweil’s keynote.

Doug Eadline and Jeff Layton are blogging at ClusterMonkey. Gala happened, we missed it. Went out to dinner a little ways down the street. Solved the camera issue. I hope. Set up a place for SC06 pictures/movies on the photo site. Hopefully it will be obvious which are SC06 … Going to be there early tomorrow. Will try lots of pictures/movies.

Picked up Jim at the airport, then made our way over. All registered. Saw lots of people already. Had some good conversations. I forgot how energy draining this is. Need to increase caloric intake. That and coffee. Doesn’t seem to be much in the way of coffee shops down here. Need to google about for that. The biggest “loss” from last year were the fleece sweaters. Sure, this is Florida, and we shouldn’t need sweaters … got two mugs.

ok, so it is later tonight, officially, at the “Gala” event. The “usual crew” of bloggers will be there, as will lots of friends and colleagues from the past. Someone once told me that Supercomputing is quite incestuous: they steal … er hire from each other with abandon. It is always enjoyable to visit and see friends with new business cards, new digs, and similar stories of how company X is in the decline and Y is ascendent.

Getting here was fun. Most everything went without a hitch. The TSA did not appreciate the larger sized toothpaste and shaving cream in my carry-on. I’ll refrain from commenting on this. I managed to leave my camera at home. Go figure. I will work out a way to get photos posted to http://photos.scalability.org . Hopefully not cell-phone quality, but real ones. Tomorrow night is the opening gala. Then tuesday night is Beo-bash, and the folks at Microsoft have invited a few people to have dinner.

Ok, I have been hinting at something we have been working on for a while. Time to talk a little more about this. This is a server we are calling “JackRabbit”. The L. Flavigularis is a particular sub-species of JackRabbit. It comes in 3U and 5U flavors, and as a storage unit, could support from 6 TB through 36 TB, with 2 to 8 processor cores, and up to 64 GB ram, with multiple gigabit ethernet, Infiniband, and other technologies.

Some of my collaborators should have a very interesting announcement about an accelerated life science application coming out soon. Stay tuned…

for our little conejo (L. Flavigularis). Create a 128 GB file. Filled with zeros. [root@jackrabbit 2]# time dd if=/dev/zero of=big_file bs=1024000000 count=128 128+0 records in 128+0 records out real 3m59.539s user 0m0.000s sys 3m38.978s [root@jackrabbit 2]# ls -alF big_file -rw-rw---- 1 root landman 131072000000 Nov 8 22:11 big_file [root@jackrabbit 2]# du -h big_file 123G big_file Call it 4 minutes. 240 seconds, to create a 123 GB file. This is a little north of 500 MB/s write.