[Update] my apologies on the trackback/pingback spam. 33 of these. Given how people are attempting to influence Google et al.’s searching algorithm by initiating these pingbacks/trackbacks … This is what SEO buys us folks. It wastes our time and resources cleaning up after it, and it negatively impacts the quality of responses to queries. This is good … how? Trackbacks and pingbacks disabled for now. I’d posted about NVidia issues with Ubuntu 10.

This. Maybe if I am lucky, I can get to play with these tools again.

Ubuntu 10.04. 4 separate machines. All having some sort of nVidia card for CUDA/GPU work. All started from base desktop load. All, every single one of them, unable to update to CUDA enabled drivers. Or even to the Canonical hosted non-CUDA drivers. Get a black screen. On all 4 boxen. With vanilla loads. With very different motherboards. I appear to be in good company. Few people can get the NVidia drivers working.

My wife consoles me with a yin-yang view. Hopefully some large amount of goodness is to occur soon. Ever have a day where you just can’t get ahead of the support queue … stuff keeps piling up. You run an errand and people call. You walk them through problems, and more call. For every one problem you fix, two new ones show up. Pretty soon, everyone is answering phones, and dealing with problems.

Ubuntu 10.04 isn’t out yet. But will be soon. In it, there are some good things, some nice things. And an insanely poor choice. They are effectively preventing users with NVidia cards from using NVidia’s drivers. You have to go through some absolutely insane hoops to be able to use NVidia’s drivers. The Nouveau driver is incomplete, isn’t up to the performance on 3D graphics, nor the stability of the NVidia drivers.

[update] Jeff said substantially the same thing last year. Go figure :O I haven’t written up my thoughts after seeing the slides, speaking with some of the support team, seeing John West and John Leidel’s discussion of Lustre 2.0 on InsideHPC … … but I need to. So here is the first (very brief) comment. Here are a set of slides (hat tip to Chris S) which neatly summarizes what we see customers thinking.

(7200 RPM 3.5 inch) SAS has a few specific advantages over (7200 RPM 3.5 inch) SATA, not enough to justify a 50% premium for storage clusters and many storage apps. A 10%? Yeah, I think that could work. I’d like to build a few more of these. Definitely.

GAMESS running on Magny Cours and Istanbul … I rebuilt them with OpenMPI 1.5 and 1.4.2. Running across 24 cores right now on each. They are running a test case now that, the previous fastest machine has been a Nehalem 3.2 GHz system. They are tearing up the track …. The sockets version isn’t as good as the MPI version. You will see/hear more about this soon, in another white paper.

c.f. here Live rates at 2010.04.23 19:18:28 UTC 1.00 USD = 0.999750 CAD United States Dollars Canada Dollars 1 USD = 0.999750 CAD 1 CAD = 1.00025 USD Yeah, I know it fluctuates. Still, nice to have parity.

Grab a copy from here. We have been playing with Magny Cours and Istanbul for a while, and will be generating a number of white papers around these efforts. Comparisons to Nehalem of similar clock speed, and if available, other units. Magny Cours is a very interesting chip. 12 processor cores in a single socket. This has some interesting implications for performance, and you have to pay attention to things you might not have thought you needed to before.