We do everything we can to stop failing subsystems from ever entering our customers hands. We beat on our systems, usually with loads far in excess of what our customers will do. No, not using memtest. We run real codes. And we catch lots of problems. What surprises me, really gets to me, is that some motherboard makers (who shall remain nameless) ship product to their customers (us) for integration into our products, or as subsystems into products we buy from others, and this product does not work.

Working on a cool project, hopefully I will get to say something soon about it. If you are at SC06, and you see me, ask me about it. I installed its brain (a pair of Opteron 2218’s) and lungs today. Have a few other bits to install; our L. flavigularis is taking shape. Taking pictures as I go. Will post after we are complete. After it is finished, will apply the power.

This post has been through countless iterations. I have written/rewritten it a multitude of times, because I was looking for a way to say it, but never quite settled on a particular manner. So here it is … stream of conciousness and all that. We had lost a few bids recently, and while I don’t want to comment on to whom or for whom, I want to comment on “why”. The reason I want to comment on the “why” is that it has importance to the market, and those whom forget this “why” are doomed to make the same mistakes.

Well I am all registered. I plan on using a better camera this year, and reading the manual in advance. No more sideways movies (sheesh!). Photos / movies will be at photos.scalability.org . I may show a bias towards accelerated computing and accelerated processing, so please forgive this in advance. If there are particular items that you think are interesting, please let me know. It is a big show, and it is hard to see all/most of it.

I had heard of some changes in the windows licensing model. Windows licensing is relevant if you are building a windows cluster, as you now have a new set of costs and usage restrictions atop your machine, that you simply don’t have with the alternatives. Lets focus upon the question that cluster builders have to face. So you have this nice shiny new cluster with 30 or so new machines. You know you are going to cycle machines in and out of the cluster.

I was searching for some data on drift/group velocity of charge carriers in semiconductors for something I am working on. Yeah, I know, nice stuff to google for. I ran across this. I nearly fell out of my chair.

Reading through some of the most interesting papers at the upcoming SC06 show. Yes, we will be there wandering around. I read an interesting paper from the originators of mpiBLAST. They had a great quote about developing very high performance computing tools, specifically in terms of tying multiple other tools together. They used Perl to do this. For good reason. Here is the quote: I am not trying to denigrate C/C++.

We often get interesting requirements for clusters. Sometimes we speak to people who believe that clock frequency defines the speed of the unit, so therefore, a 3.6 GHz processor must be faster than a 2.66 GHz processor. This is not the case (clock frequency == performance), but it has been hammered home by one OEM (cough cough) for a long time, so their customers are attuned to it. Makes it hard to explain to a customer how a 2.

We have been talking about application acceleration, and heterogenous computing for quite a while now. Call it HPC and you scare off anyone who might otherwise be interested in helping to build the future of computing. It really doesn’t matter what you call it at the end of the day. It is coming. Fast. Fine. Lets call it Accelerated Computing (AC for short). I have a reason for this. Accelerated computing is not just for high performance computing.

Deepak over at the always enjoyable mndoci.com blog asked a great question. Its the question about the utility of any technology, and specifically he asked whether or not APUs and accelerators in general would be useful. Around the same time, a BAA was released by the US Government requesting people start giving accelerated computing a serious look for their applications, though they didn’t indicate the applications explicitly, one could guess about this.