Finishing up building an testing system for Ceph for a customer. Unfortunately, due to another technical issue, we couldn’t simply encode the config in tiburon finishing scripts. The technical issue is the use of the current tiburon master system by another project, and we don’t have another spare system to build a mirror of it (going to change this soon), we are stuck using an older more rudimentary version of the system.

[update] In 3.3.1/3.3.2 This appeared in the 3.3.0 docs. “NOTE: with 3.3.0 release, transport type ‘rdma’ and ‘tcp,rdma’ are not fully supported.” On page 133 of the Admin Guide. We’ve been noting breakage with support since the 3.0.x days. I think there were varying factions within the company that wanted pure tcp, and some wanted RDMA included. The latter is what HPC folks use for their storage. GlusterFS is going in a decidedly non-HPC direction, which is fine.

[updated to get the count right] Thats how long the day job has been in business. Our 10 year anniversary is 1-August. I started this business 10 years ago, in part to scratch an itch, but really because I believed strongly in the HPC market. I still do, though our view of the market has evolved, and we look on how its been evolving with mixtures of joy and trepidation. Trepidation in part because we’ve been pretty good at predicting what comes next, and sadly not been able to raise the capital needed to build in that area (at least previously).

You need a sound business model. Not a sound business plan, but a concept of where revenue comes in, and how you will profit from it, and what your costs are, before you should build and sell a product. In the case of state sponsored infrastructure, any model that looks like this: 1. Build it 2. ??? 3. Profit! is a failure waiting to happen. Its not a business model.

[update] Good for them, the NFIB hits back, hard. No mental gymanstics required to correctly interpret what was said. Further they back it up with almost identical quotes from Elisabeth Warren herself, who appears to be the originator of this epic failure of a meme. This entire meme deserves all the derision being heaped on it. [update 2] And the pile on begins in earnest. James Pethokoukis (economics blogger and many other things) has some good comments of his own, as well as from others.

More than a year ago, we were working on (re)developing some code for UI for our units. Original UI code had been in Catalyst framework, an MVC system for Perl. I like Perl, it makes rapid application development easy, and reasonably painless. CPAN makes avoiding coding things yourself pretty easy. Short side trip. A dependency radius is the measure of the number of additional things unrelated to your source code itself, required to build or operate your program.

See here First off, congratulations to Brent, Eric, and everyone at Whamcloud. I had thought that the BI/Big Data side of things could prove interesting for them, and might make them in play. I hadn’t realized how quickly this was the case. Second, Big Data is huge. Lustre, which is effectively Whamcloud’s product (ignoring IP ownership, yadda yadda …), can play there, though it needs some serious additional work. But with the acquisition, I’d argue that the multithreading MDS and ODS are not far off.

Been a thunderbird email client since 2004. Dropped Evolution in favor of thunderbird, it just worked, everywhere, the same. Around 2009-2010 time period, Mozilla decided to refocus thunderbird. Pull resources from it. This didn’t work out well, as users protested rather intensely. Looks like they are about to do it again, specifically to start chasing the mobile market. This letter on pastebin … and the priceless commentary afterwords, yeah … says it all.

4U, 256TB raw, fire breathing monsterously fast unit. Our existing 5U units already leave competitors single units, never mind their storage clusters, deep in the dust, and falling rapidly behind. Next gen isn’t incremental change. Its big. Huge even. Density and performance that boggles my mind, and we’ve set some pretty serious records for performance (5.6 GB/s read, 4.5 GB/s write for spinning disk) with the existing kit. And you will see these very soon.

Reuters has an article on it here. Not my area of work from a while ago, but I had a few friends (postdocs, etc.) working on it (in a theoretical sense). One quit high energy physics to work on the “muck left over after the big bang”. The latter is where the money and jobs are, the former is for those who get lucky and find an academic home. I find it funny how reporters tend to paint groups with broad strokes.