Financial Times reports Google is restricting Windows deployments for security reasons. We do still run windows, but mostly in VMs at this point. Frankly, this is one of the very few ways we know that we can be safe in using Windows. We can recover from the nearly inevitable viri/trojans quickly. In part by not letting Windows touch the silicon directly. We can bottle it up, put hard restrictions on it, and if it gets infected, revert very quickly to a previous non-infected variant.

Our siCluster storage cluster, currently running Lustre 1.8.2 on Centos 5.4 is attached to the #77 system on the top500 supercomputer list

Gotta laugh a little. Feel bad for them, they don’t quite know all the ins and outs of what they are getting into. And thats fine. Nothing quite like jumping into it with both feet and hoping you can stay afloat. More power to them. I hope they survive this choice, though the last folks that did that to us didn’t last a year.

Last year, we began working with a local group whose founder/president I had known for a few years previously. I won’t name them. We have a real need for capital. The company is self funded, and this means we fund all purchases out of our own pocket, or from our own lines of credit. And in some cases, being a small business, from my credit card (Lesson one in how to give a spouse a coronary: put a large purchase on a personal credit card … you know, 5 or more digits before the decimal point).

Saw this post on /. and the article it linked to. In it, the authors discuss human capital, the density of “smart people” (which they define as those with baccalaureate and graduate degrees). Using their particular definition (I won’t say if I do or do not agree with it right now), Detroit area, where we are, is near the bottom of the long tail. I can say that the places they indicate at the top of the heap … SF, NYC, Minneapolis, Chicago, Seattle, Boston, Miami … all places I have spend time working in with customers and users … I’ve very much enjoyed my stay.

… slow posting … will get back soon.

So it was an experience getting back from Chicago to attend my tournament. But it was worth it. First the experience: Flight out was supposed to be at 4:40pm CST. Was delayed a little (airport was hectic), annoyed me a bit, as I had volunteered to help on the tournament setup, and I wound up missing this. Oh, and I left my ever-present bluetooth headset at the security checkpoint. More on that at the end.

One of the issues we ran into with Lustre on our siCluster was the inability to use the kernel of our choice. Lustre is quite invasive in its patch sets. So modern kernels, ones with subsystem fixes, driver updates, and other things we need …. can’t necessarily host Lustre without some serious forward porting of the code base. And this got me thinking. This isn’t the only project tied to specific kernel versions, and effectively unable to use an arbitrary kernel version.

Customer: We were told you make really fast tightly coupled storage and computing systems. Me (in my best Dr. Galakowicz voice): Yes, yes we do. They are fast. Really fast. Did I mention, they are fast? Customer: Thats great, ‘cause we need fast! Fast is really important to us. Fast is good. Really fast. Fast. … er … but we have a problem. Me: yes? Customer: er … we can only buy from vendor X … they won’t let us buy anything else Me: Even if you have a quantifiable business need, and your projects objectives wouldn’t be met by vendor X’s slow stuff, which represents an effective existential project risk?

Lustre 1.8.2 on SuSE is IMO, broken. I am not sure if it is repairable. Most of my comments on the brittle nature of Lustre come from this. Reloading with Centos 5.4, we are rock solid stable. Its scary. I am not sure what the issue is, but I think all future Lustre deployments we are going to do will focus upon Centos 5.4.