As seen on /. IBM is questioning whether or not it is really open. I think the real question is, does it matter? I really don’t see a need for it. The market is positively crowded with OpenSouce Linux, *BSD. OpenSource should not be a repository for declining projects. From an ISV perspective, you have to ask “why”? Precisely what benefit in terms of lower costs and increased revenue does being on Solaris bring?

A friend who runs a very cool display company (true 3D volumetric displays, not spinning things), asked me to do a quick benchmark for him. As I was freshly done with some other GLperf stuff, I agreed. FWIW getting GLperf to compile on late model Linux is … well… interesting. Especially the 64bit versions. Lots of hardwired bits in the build. Annoying. His test was fairly simple, but it hit the critical points he needed to hit.

(aka the QUADs are coming, the QUADs are coming) I was worried about memory bandwidth in the dual core time frame. Turned out to not be a problem for most codes. I will need to see more on the AM3. Punch line is that AM3 is socket compatible with AM2. Wow. Will it have enough bandwidth for 4 cores in a single unit? We are going to need to start talking about bandwidth per socket.

The good folks over at BioInformatics.org have a new workshop ready to go on programming in [Perl and R. See this link for more details. If there is interest in having this outside of Boston, please let me know.

Ok, its about 2 weeks into the woodcrest experiment. I am starting to form opinions about woodcrest, where it is good, where it is hohum. First off, woodcrest appears to give really good artificial benchmark. In some cases. Artificial benchmarks are those which are not programs that people run every day with everyday work loads. Synthetic benchmarks are more of the “hundred kernels” variety. Both artificial and synthetic benchmarks have their place.

I have noticed a propensity for corporate “bloggers” to somehow turn discussions around to the point where they can do a product placement, or somehow hype their own stuff. Think of things like “so the Yankees will win the series, and this is why our product X is the best”. I kid you not. Blogging is, or can be, an expression of self. Not arguing for philosophical purity or anything like that.

Some readers may misunderstand this blog. Blogs in general are places to get thoughts down, in a public forum, and invite discussion. Sort of an open-source idea site. Download an opinion and fork it if you like, ignore it if you wish. It is a reflection of each person, how they view the world, and how they think, and their approach to life that filters into this stuff. Elements of personality are in there.

I have been talking with a person about using FPGAs to accelerate non-scientific applications, business applications recently. The idea is fundamentally interesting. HPC is not the only thing that needs acceleration. My question is this: Where are the critical pain points, what processing takes a great deal of time that people would be willing to spend, I dunno, $10,000 US to make go faster? I am using $10,000 US as a rough guess.

I haven’t said anything about SGI recently, been too busy with other things. This is good, but much has been happening in SGI land. First, I had wondered whether or not SGI stake holders would get anything out of the company … that is, whether or not it would survive the bankruptcy proceedings. It does appear to be navigating those waters well, but it is worth noting a few things in case you haven’t followed the story.

See this bit of propaganda and the money quotes on Linux within Let me get this straight … I want to make sure I understand this … You really want your expensive HPC computing resource/platform setup by someone who doesn’t know HPC? Sort of like you wanting that expensive database server set up by a windows technician with no knowledge of databases? Or that nice web server set up by someone with no knowledge of web servers.