NVidia grabs the Portland Group. This makes sense, as NVIdia has had CUDA, which is LLVM based, and needed a more general purpose compiler technology. There is nothing wrong with CUDA, but its very GPU specific. PGI tech allows them to talk very generally, and get support for non-GPU hardware acceleration. Such as massive collections of ARM. I expect more M&A; and investment activity over the next few months.

… is when large multi-hundred million or multi-billion dollar public companies try to ignore “small” bills from smaller than multi-hundred million dollar companies. Very much related to this. We are operationally funded. Every dollar I pay my team with comes from cash flow. So when companies try to cheat us out of money by not paying their bills, and then ignore our requests for payment … Yeah, this gets old. I prodded a reseller on this pretty hard today.

is due, in significant part, to bad law and bad policy enshrined in law. Ideological view points are hard coded in the firmware of Michigan. Which allows lawsuits and results such as this. It cannot be overemphasized how bone-headed this particular law is. That one can never, under any circumstances, reduce pensioner benefit values. This means, if you ever struck a bad deal, like Detroit, and many others in Michigan have, you have no choice but to continue this bad deal for eternity.

This brings me no joy. I went to grad school in Detroit. I like this city. It has character, it has guts, it has potential. It also has no cash to continue operations. And that sucks. Detroit filed for chapter 9 bankruptcy a few hours ago. There are many reasons for this, but there are a number of specific ones, that are generalizable to businesses as well. First, population decline has led to a tax revenue decline.

A scammer has been spoofing the day job’s number for the last year and a half. We’ve have been trying … very hard … to get anyone at all, to cooperate with us to try to find out whom these losers are, so we can take them out. We have had no luck. No one wants to help. No one. Even execs at phone companies. Go figure. One kid called last year so incensed that his mother was targeted by the scammers that he said he was going to get a gun and go meet with these jokers.

On my vacation in NY recently, I happened to be able to tick off another item on my bucket list. There’s some background to it, but here’s the pics. [ ](/images/IMG_1454.JPG) [ ](/images/IMG_1456.JPG) and [ ](/images/IMG_1459.JPG) The background to this is a short story I’ve been working on for a while. A near future serum run in effect. Should be done very soon, though I’ve been working on it in very short bursts.

I’ve not reported it, but STEC was acquired by Western Digital. STEC has been one of the day job’s partners for high performance SSD technology. Unfortunately, we’ve not had great luck with WD in the past. Even gone so far as to recall/replace specific models from every machine shipped globally with those drives, due to very high failure rates, and a complete unwillingness on the part of WD to either admit defective firmware, or RMA defective drives.

[vacation edition: posted from an undisclosed location somewhere off 9A in Fishkill NY, after leaving a really bad airbnb experience in Scarsdale NY] Here Russell from Scalable Informatics and Rich from InsideHPC (check em out!) talk about STAC M3 benchmarks, siCloud (aka ‘the beast'), and some of the capability class tests we ran. More later, but I am on vacation …

I’ve been hinting at, and alluding to a benchmark we (the day job) ran on a new product for a while. I took a month to rerun these tests, verifying everything. I wanted to make sure that we got this right. Because these are big numbers. Then we sat on it for another month. Give us time to reflect, what will people’s reaction be? We slowly leaked a few pointers to people.

Its probably fair to say that CentOS/RHEL startup mechanism is, well, broken beyond repair for anything but trivial cases. Out of the box, NFS root doesn’t work, and its very … extraordinarily … hard … to make it work. iSCSI and other connection mechanisms don’t work. This has been the case since 6.0. 6.4 continues the long tradition of working for trivial cases, and not working for anything remotely more interesting.