hopefully it works this time …

A few prefaces … First, I disagree with the premise throughout this article that our governor is timid. He is, IMO, and in many people’s opinion, doing a great job. Governor Romney is very similar to Governor Snyder in many ways. Timidity really isn’t apparent. I guess that people see someone making a cost-benefit analysis for engaging in a particular debate, or pushing for a particular outcome, and deciding to forgo a particular fight, as being timid.

I’ve hinted a little at what’s going on, but I haven’t come fully clean yet. Will do soon. I promise, though likely it will be public after SC12. Suffice it to say that the company is on a track to grow significantly in the near term. No, this is neither a capital raise, nor an acquisition. We have a practical problem. We’ll be setting up an office in NJ/NY area to serve our customer base there, and we will need extremely good technical and support people, along with some of the other folks we plan to put there.

We’ve started following an interesting suggestion made to us. It involves some cost, but its got the nice side effect of providing us (eventually) with the call data records from the phone company. Assume we will be getting the information we need, soon, to deal with this. We have a potent legal cocktail waiting for this information. Of course, the scammers decided to step things up a bit. One claimed to be with the FBI.

Had neglected to mention this, but all of the day job’s units support 4TB drives. This means you can get 4U goodness up to 96TB, 5U goodness up to 192TB, and very soon (and we’ll start taking early orders for it) 4U with up to (about) 1/4 PB directly coupled to a very fast computer, with incredible amounts of IO and network bandwidth. Full 42U rack with about 2.5PB raw, and about 40GB/s sustained streaming write, and 60GB/s sustained streaming read performance in aggregate.

Bigger booth this year, number 4154 (10x20) … last year was WAY too cramped. Planning stuff … keeping it simple if possible. Maybe a minirack with a siCluster … thinking about this hard. Definitely a dense storage system, an insanely fast storage system. Probably some streaming stuff, and pounding on IO similar to what we did at HPC on Wall Street. Will probably have a few partners with us (and their bits) in the booth.

Ok … maybe not so much destroyed. More like “ignored as a reasonable test of anything but DIMM visibility, and very basic functionality”. Memtest has several variants running around, all of which purport to hammer on, and detect, bad RAM. The only problem is, it doesn’t really work well, apart from trivial cases. That is, if you have an iffy ram, you’d need days/weeks/months of testing with this code rather than putting it in a box and running a hard pounding code on it.

:D More soon. I promise.

We showed two large speedometers, one with Bandwidth, one with IOPs. These measured their data right off the hardware (via the device driver and block subsystem mechanisms). First, we ran a fio test with 96 threads reading 1.1TB of data in total. This took about 100 seconds or so. Second, we ran a fio test with 384 threads randomly reading 8k chunks of data out of that 1.1TB. Left them in a loop, with a big speedometer pair on the screen.

Useful code (e.g. code == program) has a tendency to save you lots of pain when other solutions fail you. Powerful code lets you do things that lesser codes mess up. Intelligently designed and written codes allow you to debug them easily and quickly, as well as their operational impacts. None of these qualities describes grub. Grub is … well … grub. If you have to deal with it on a daily basis, you understand what I mean by this.