Fads are standing waves of marketing/sales/technology that have limited lifetime, yet generate buzz. Fads die out, and they consume resources during their existence. Fads rarely ever do more than help cull the herd … assisting evolutionary processes that weed crappy technology dressed up nicely and packaged for sale. Best example of these I can come up with were the cycle stealing codes, that turned your machine into a “supercomputer” by aggregating cycles across many hundreds and thousands of machines.

Rich B at InsideHPC.com posts about the national labs exit from floorspace at SC12. The claim is due to budget cuts, but the GSA scandal and its fallout likely have a higher precedence to the upper echelon of decision makers. Which if you think about it, only a minute amount, you realize is the very definition of the cliche to cut ones nose off to spite their face. To any decision makers out there, this is the wrong thing to do.

I don’t know that we’ll be able to get enough 4TB drives for all the units. We’ll talk about it some more at SC12, and should have a few units with 4TB, 3TB, and possibly 2TB drives in them. For those whom aren’t aware, our JackRabbit unit is already the fastest spinning disk single server that we are aware of in market. Its dense, up to 144TB in a 5U container.

Charles Stross (@cstross) is one of my favorite writers. We have wildly different views on things, but I like his writing, and his very clear thinking and story telling. Which is why I have to say that this blog post puts a nice context box around some of the things we hear about “saving the planet.” Something akin to this has been running around my head for a while, but not nearly as elegantly put.

[update 2] Yuppers, Amazon US East N. Virginia is experiencing issues. C.f. here. Doug thought I did this with our IP update (larger block of static). So did I for a moment until I logged in. Partial failure on my part for not having the backup live/ready. Wlll remedy over the next day or two. [update] I think we can call this one a #fail. Imagine if some small business with no technical acumen, sold on the “push this button to run your website” saw that error message.

Saw this linked on from zerohedge. Understand that, to a degree, this is a sales pitch for this persons' new fund. But the reasoning behind doing what they are doing is fascinating to me. Along with a description of what happened to the global financial markets. Definitely worth the view just for the history and an analysis of macroeconomic trends.

… the game may be over. Ok, this is a very well written, and extremely cogent argument. Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, indicated why he’s not supporting Obama, and is endorsing Romney in the US Presidential election. His reasons boil down to a firing offense Mr. Obama committed (in Adams' opinion). More specifically, he indicates that he doesn’t like lots of Romney’s positions, but Romney hasn’t committed this particular offense. And specifically to the point of competence, Adams gets that Romney is a turn-around guy.

$131M quarterly loss. They have a looming 15% (think one out of every seven) RIF. I remember those from SGI days. I remember being on an ACS show floor, giving demos, and learning that some of my colleagues on the show floor with me, were part of the RIF. SGI itself isn’t doing well, but thats a story for another time. Still have lots of friends at AMD. Folks I’ve worked with and respect highly.

Assuming all the hardware is ready … not sure, but hopefully it will be. We’ll have a siCluster at the booth. Powered by partner’s 10/40GbE fabric, and running a few different cluster file systems. FhGFS is a no brainer, it will be on there. Ceph should be on there. GlusterFS should be on there. Thinking about Lustre, may do this via our presentation layer, so we can avoid dealing with the pain of hyperspecialized kernels, and specific hard distro revision requirements.

One of the best parallel file systems just got better. FhGFS now has content mirroring (client and server side!) as well as other nice improvements! We’ve used the preceding release on our siFlash unit. I’ve not shared the results publicly to date, but suffice it to say that the performance was absolutely stellar (it helps that siFlash is the fastest 4U SSD/Flash tightly coupled computing and storage array in market). We are planning out our SC12 booth now.