One of the other aspects of what we’ve been doing has been forward porting drivers into newer kernels, fixing the occasional bug, and often rewriting portions to correct interface changes. I’ve found that subsystem vendors seem to prefer to drop code into the kernel very infrequently. Sometimes once every few years are they synced. Which leads to distro kernels having often terribly broken device support. And often very unstable device support.

So we build our own kernels. No great surprise, as we put our own patches in, our own drivers, etc. We have a nice build environment for RPMs and .debs. It works, quite well. Same source, same patches, same make file driving everything. We get shiny new and happy kernels out the back end, ready for regression/performance/stability testing. Works really well. But … but … parallel builds (e.g. leveraging more than 1 CPU) work only for the RPM builds.

I use Mozilla’s thunderbird mail client. For all its faults, it is still the best cross platform email system around. Apple’s mail client is a bad joke and only runs on apple devices (go figure). Linux’s many offerings are open source, portable, and most don’t run well on my Mac laptop. I no longer use Windows apart from running in a VirtualBox environment. And I would never go back to OutLook anyway (used it once, 15 years ago or so … never again).

Rich at InsideHPC.com (you do read it daily, don’t you?) just posted our (long) interview from SC14. Have a look at it here (http://insidehpc.com/2015/01/video-scalable-informatics-steps-io-sc14/) . As a reminder, Portable PetaBytes are for sale! And yes, the response has been quite good … More soon … And no, we aren’t going to hack anyone

The day job lives at a crossroads of sorts. We design, build, sell, and support some of the fastest hyperconverged (aka tightly coupled) storage and computing systems in market. We’ve been talking about this model for more than a decade, and interestingly, the market for this has really taken off over the last 12 months. The idea is very simple. Keep computing, networking, and storage very tightly tied together, and enable applications to leverage the local (and distributed) resources at the best possible speed.

Its that time of year, when the inventory fairies come out and begin their counting. Math isn’t hard, but the day job would like a faster and easier count this year. So, the day job is working on selling off existing inventory. We have 4 units ready to go out the door to anyone in need of 70-144TB usable storage at 5-6 GB/s per unit. Specs are as follows: 16-24 processor cores 128 GB RAM 48x {2,3,4} TB top mount drives 4x rear mount SSDs (OS/metadata cache) Scalable OS (Debian Wheezy based Linux OS) 3 year warranty As this is inventory reduction, the more inventory you take, the happier we are (and the less work that the inventory fairies have to do).

As seen at SC14. We have our Portable PetaByte systems available for sale. Half rack to many racks, 1 PB and upwards, 20GB/s and up. Faster with SSDs. See the link above!

Its been 3 years to the day since I wrote this. As we’ve been doing before this happened, and after this happened, we are going to a TSO concert on the anniversary of the surgery. Its an affirmation of sorts. I can tell you that 3 years in, it has changed me in some fairly profound ways … I no longer take some things for granted. I try to spend more time with the family, do more things with them.

An interesting thing happened over the last few months and years. Systemd, a replacement init process for Linux, gained more adherents, and supplanted the older style init.d/rc scripting in use by many distributions. Ubuntu famously abandoned init.d style processing in favor of upstart and others in the past, and has been rolling over to systemd. Red Hat rolled over to Systemd. As have a number of others. Including, surprisingly, Debian. For those whom don’t know what this is, think of it this way.