… yeah, the kidney stone saga continues. Had a basket extraction Wednesday, fine most of Thursday till evening, then Friday morning, they decided to remind me who was boss. Off the the ER I went, in terrible pain. Kidney stones are not life threatening, though there are times you wish death was less painful. Well, now one of 3 has been removed (second extraction), other 2 will be blown up soon.

[update] trackbacks/pingbacks temporarily disabled. Waaay too much spam. Seriously. From their updated user agreement: They own you … or at least anything you say or can be linked to you saying.

Finishing a siCluster build for a customer. We need to see what we can do here. On the test track, and opening up the throttle wide. [root@<a href="http://scalableinformatics.com/jackrabbit">jr4</a>-1 burn-in]# fio sw.fio write: io=97,808MB, bw=1,501MB/s, iops=188, runt= 65183msec ... Run status group 0 (all jobs): WRITE: io=97,808MB, aggrb=1,501MB/s, minb=1,537MB/s, maxb=1,537MB/s, mint=65183msec, maxt=65183msec [root@jr4-1 burn-in]# fio sr.fio ... read : io=97,808MB, bw=1,975MB/s, iops=248, runt= 49521msec Run status group 0 (all jobs): READ: io=97,808MB, aggrb=1,975MB/s, minb=2,022MB/s, maxb=2,022MB/s, mint=49521msec, maxt=49521msec Thats nice …

Well … more correctly, fixed the data model to be saner, so that the tools would be easier to develop and use. Still a few more things to do, and one (simple) presentation abstraction to set up. The gist of it is that (apart from the automatically added nodes), adding nodes by hand should be easy. This also means by XML (not done yet, but I know how to do this), and web (basically XML or CGI like devices).

I’ve pointed to Ceph before. It is an object storage file system, with lots of very nice features, current and planned. As a cluster file system, it has much going for it. Combined with btrfs, and a few other things, this could be a very exciting development. This is a good thing. Stay tuned for more. We’ll have some basic testing up in a while. We’ll start at 2.6.34 to use the merged bits.

I found the article on InsideHPC about Addison’s presentation quite useful. The presentation is available from the link above. Some points he made, I’d like to take issue with. Specifically, page 9, he notes that Windows HPC is “still coming”. I am not too sure of this. I think it has been a multi-year, almost half decade experiment, that at some point, needs to show that its revenue is greater than the cost of that revenue.

I’ve argued for a while that accelerators are going to be a creative and destructive force in HPC. They profoundly change the cost per cycle landscape, as well as the number of cycles per unit time. I’ve pointed out here that despite some misunderstanding of transformative technological trends, that better cheaper faster is one of the most important driving forces in HPC. It is a viable business model if you can figure out how to get the appropriate traction, and its very hard for larger organizations to adequately respond.

For those who don’t know Dr. Glen Otero, he has been a tireless advocate for all things HPC in Life sciences. His background is in computational immunology. Great to work with. He has an article on the Dell Tech Center (yeah, I know, I need to update the blogroll, I’ll do it this weekend) on a “controversy” thats been finding fertile ground in the conspiracy theory amplifying interwebs. I highly recommend this article.

see this link for more. Specifically the mention of Yeah … definitely a siCluster benchmark. Its a shame we weren’t asked for help promoting this. We have quite a few nice results with this system. The benchmarks for end user accessable streaming performance are hard for many folks to believe. You should hear some of the comments we get, such as “there is no way you can achieve these results with your setup.

The day job currently has siClusters in the field with GlusterFS, Lustre, and a few other “older” parallel file systems. GlusterFS is a distributed file system with a very interesting and powerful design concept. It is under active development by a venture backed company, Gluster, Inc. I can’t say enough good things about it, and the company behind it. The day job is in a relationship with them, so you may take this information for what its worth, and weight it accordingly.