Our little L. Flavigularis is shaping up nicely. IOzone tests are, well, quite respectable (bug me at SC06 about this if you are interested). I expect to see some serious FUD from competitors, especially if they get a look at the numbers. And that concerns me, as I am not at all convinced that IOzone and its ilk represent real measurements of meaningful items. I have a strong sense of a “herd” mentality/effect.

We took L. Flavigularis out to to a test track in a manner of speaking. IOzone to be specific. We cracked the throttle a bit. Not flat out. Just a speed trial. Wow …. This little critter is fast. The previous numbers … are at the low end of the range.

landman@balto ~ $ ping jackrabbit <!-- more --> landman@balto ~ $ nslookup !$ nslookup jackrabbit Server: crunch-r.scalableinformatics.com Address: x.y.z.t Name: jackrabbit Address: 192.168.1.155 landman@balto ~ $ ping jackrabbit ping: unknown host jackrabbit Oh… it gets better. Run strace on ping jackrabbit. I want to know where the failure is. I’ll tell you why in a minute. 487 246858 [main] ping 3308 sig_send: returning 0x0 from sending signal -34 21823 268681 [main] ping 3308 wsock_init: res 0 607 269288 [main] ping 3308 wsock_init: wVersion 514 313 269601 [main] ping 3308 wsock_init: wHighVersion 514 6813 276414 [main] ping 3308 wsock_init: szDescription WinSock 2.

We have a machine we are building in the lab now. I am running all sorts of code on it. My impressions? It is a somewhat better Opteron than Opteron. The tests I have run to date indicate that the 2.6 GHz unit is on par with, if not slightly faster than the Woodcrest 2.66 GHz unit. This is mostly heavy computational code: GAMESS runs, a weather code for a customer, and others.

Saw this on /. then followed it to the WSJ.. If this is real, then this is a good thing. SuSE is IMO one of the better distributions of Linux, certainly quite professional, and they use a modern kernel. This latter issue is quite important. The 2.6.9 kernel in some dominant north american distributions is dangerously out of date IMO, as they do not support modern hardware without serious effort. SATA was not properly supported until their U2 release of the v4 product.

Taking our little L. flavigularis for a few tests. Its motherboard needs the 2.6.17 and above kernels. Used Ubuntu Edgy Eft (6.10) for it. Even had the latest version of the drivers we needed built in. Install was easy. The specs on the unit are incredible (initial performance data below). Built the disk arrays (ok, started the build, it takes a while). 26TB RAID6 usable before formatting. Cool. 25TB after formatting.

So we have had a woodcrest in house for a while now. When we have time we beat on it, we ran codes on it. My impressions are now well formed, and I understand where it makes sense as a platform, and where the competitive technologies make sense. This is not from marketing documents, but from real world testing. Woodcrest is basically an AMD64 platform without the IOMMU. The processor architecture includes a much improved SSE engine, a larger shared cache, and theoretically, a larger memory bandwidth than its competitor.

While spam is on the rise, some people resort to battlefield thermonuclear weapons to solve the issue, not caring about the grave damage they do to legitimate users. Specifically RBLs. RBLs are an old technology. The idea is that you don’t filter content, you block the source. This way you don’t ever have to deal with content you aren’t interested in. They blocking subnets. Things were good. Until someone noticed that legitimate users, who had the IPs in those subnets were being banned.

A number of folks have spoken to me offline now about this post. Seems like a number of “vendors” drop boxes off that sometimes work, and sometimes do not. Anyone have experience with this they would like to share?

Ok… I moved 34.5 TB between two sites in about 30 minutes. This is a hair under 70 TB/hour. About 19.4 GB/s. Not bad, eh? The technology that brought you this? A 10 year old jeep. I carried 46 x 750 GB drives in my truck as I moved them from site A to site B, about 30 miles (~50km) apart.