We have a business account at home. I work enough from home that I can easily justify it. Fixed IP, and I run services, mostly to back up my office services. One of those services is SMTP. I’ve been running an SMTP server, complete with antispam/antivirus/… for years. Handles backup for some domains, but is also primary for this site. This is allowable on business accounts. Or it was allowable. 3 days ago, they seem to have turned that off.

This is Michael Crichton of Andromeda Strain, Jurassic park, and other stories. Fantastic story teller, he absolutely nails his subject. The original was on his website, and I grabbed a copy from here. One of the wonderful quotable paragraphs within is this: A real scientist is, by its own very definition, a skeptic.

I read a note on IBM’s recent allocation of capital towards research projects. It had this tidbit in there: Well, there are a range of III-V materials. Not just GaAs. One of the big issues is the lattice mis-match between SI and many of the III-V material. This strain introduces “artifacts” in the bandstructure, not to mention structural morphologies. This said, those artifacts may be what the engineers want. Aluminum Phosphate and Gallium Phosphate are pretty well matched to SI.

I’ve been exercising my mad-programming skillz for a while on a variety of things. I got it in my head to port the benchmarks posted on julialang.org to perl a while ago, so I’ve been working on this in the background for a few weeks. I also plan, at some point, to rewrite them in q/kdb+, as I’ve been really wanting to spend more time with it. The benchmarks aren’t hard to rewrite.

An interesting debate came about on Beowulf list. Basically, someone asked if they could use Gentoo as a distro for building a cluster, after seeing a post from someone whom did something similar. The answer of course is “yes”, with the more detailed answer being that you use what you need to build the cluster and provide the cycles that you or your users will consume. Hey, look, if someone really, truly wants to run their DOS application, Tiburon/Scalable OS will boot it.

Trying to set up a channel bond into a 10GbE LAG. Set up bonding module, use the ‘miimon=200 mode=802.3ad’ options. The switch was sending LACP packets, 1/sec to the NICs. The NICs bond formed. But it didn’t seem to negotiate the LACP circuit correctly with the switch. The switch never registered it. I’ve not seen that one before. With Mellanox, Arista, Cisco, others like that, the LACP circuit forms correctly and quickly.

We have a number of nice new customers that have been absorbing about all of my time for the last few weeks. This is goodness. One has our current generation FastPath Cadence SSD converged computing and storage system, and will be running kdb+ on it. Another has a 1PB Unison parallel file system, and while we did the previous 2TB write in 73 seconds with it, we did some tuning and tweaking and are down to 68 seconds.

Ok, didn’t see this acquirer coming, but PLX being bought … yeah, this makes sense. Avago looks like they are trying to become the glue between systems, whether the glue is a data storage fabric, or communications fabric, etc. PLX makes PCIe switches and other kit. PCIe switch and interconnection is the direction that many are converging to. Best end to end latencies, best per-lane performance, no protocol stack silliness to deal with.

This is only the beginning folks … only the beginning. See this. FusionIO was, quite arguably, in trouble. They needed a buyer to take them to the next level, and to avoid being made completely irrelevant. SanDisk is a natural partner for them. They have the fab and chips, FusionIO has a product. SanDisk has a vision for a flash-only data center. What’s interesting about this is that Fusion was sort of the last independent enterprise class PCI Flash vendors.

[Update 16-June] We’ve sold the 64 bay FastPath Cadence (siFlash based) , and now we have a few more 60 bay hybrid Ceph and FhGFS units, as well as a 48 bay front mount siFlash. Whats coming in are many of our next gen 60 bay units, with a new backplane design, and we want to start running benchmarks with them ASAP. As we have limited space in our facility, we gotta make hard choices … Email me (landman@scalableinformatics.