Achieving a Ph.D. is one of the highest academic goals one can set. You work insanely hard, you sacrifice income, starting a family, and many other things, in the pursuit of this (in most cases). And when you finish, you are, theoretically, in an upper strata of accomplishment. Many (including myself) entered into this path, decades ago, based upon (now known to be either overtly falsified, or completely incompetently analyzed) data which suggested a dearth of scientists needed to staff the ever growing colleges and universities departments, and the massively growing industrial scientific community, as a solid rationale for pursuing such a difficult course.

Time. Basically I have none. I steal some here and there to get things out, but I have been completely swamped. Or I post when I am up late at night/early morning, and can’t get to sleep (occasional hazard of running a growing business). On a happy note, the company is growing. We have brought 4 people on board over the last six months, with an additional 2-4 planned near term.

This is going to take a few paragraphs to set up, to please bear with me. One of the harder aspects to building a business atop someone else’s platform is a fundamental dependency upon them that you create. Your business depends, to a very large extent upon their good will, and their desire to grow an ecosystem. Every now and then you get more predatory platform providers. These groups like to take control of larger segments of ecosystem, and provide a product or service that gets harder for others to compete with, because, in part, they are naturally disadvantaged in doing so.

So here I am, with an ATI W5000 card driving my dual display Linux desktop. I had pulled the NVidia GEForce card, as the driver or the card kept tossing Xid: NVRM errors, that I could not make go away. Googling this error took me back to years of people dealing with similar issues, and never getting a fix. Just reporting the same problem. That was very annoying. The day job has customers with these cards … exactly what are we supposed to be telling them?

[update] Ok, this was amusing. An SEO group commented with a link back to their SEO site. Our spam filter caught it. (/shakes head) We had the most … well … interesting event happen at the office a few days ago. You know how, in your spam filtered email you get hundreds or thousands of items with wording something like this: If you were my Client you would be # 1 on Google or I can make you # 1 on Google in 3 Weeks.

This is 8x nodes (2x EnergyCards) of Calxeda goodness. We expect to be able to show off (and demo!) a live, more heavily ARMed unit shortly. [ ](/images/ARMed_JackRabbit.jpg)

Basic (conservative) configuration of the day jobs' high performance tightly coupled storage system, no SSDs (apart from the OS drives). RAID6 LUNs, no RAID0’s. This is spinning rust folks. Nothing but spinning rust. In a realistic configuration. And no, we haven’t yet begun to tune this. Streaming writes, 1 thread per LUN: Run status group 0 (all jobs): WRITE: io=1279.5GB, aggrb=5944.6MB/s, minb=5944.6MB/s, maxb=5944.6MB/s, mint=220405msec, maxt=220405msec 5.9 GB/s sustained writes for this case.

On this blog, I’ve pointed out the failings of many others. I’ve hinted at having to take ownership for others failures as the customer sees us, and not the people behind us (often messing with us). Our job is, among many other things, to hide that silliness away from them so they can focus upon their issues. This is not to say we/I don’t mess up. Most of the time its minor.

Thursday morning, the weather prediction was for 1-3 inches of snow in Secaucus, NJ. I’d been in a data center working the past week on bringing a system to final state. Its done modulo some cosmetic and minor functional issues that should not impede usage. So we accomplished this mission, though I am something of a perfectionist, so we’ll be going back out in a week or so to work on the cosmetic bits.

We have this dilemma. Customers who see our siCluster systems often like everything they see, but want “minor” changes. And we evaluate the changes they want for impact, describe it, and suggest a go/no-go based upon many aspects. Including supportability, stability, etc. We like providing this flexibility. Which gives rise to the dilemma. For us to provide supportable systems that work in a predictable manner, we have to cordon off changes.