I’ll describe it more later, but this will be showing up in our siCluster units in short order. Some experiments we did on this over the past week have met with a resounding success, and give us a level of flexibility that I hadn’t anticipated before. Now, if I can figure out how to integrate Tiburon and Jumpstart (launch Jumpstart from Tiburon), or figure out how to provision OpenSolaris systems over PXE boot.

A customer wants to test this. We want to load it for them. As we have discovered in the process …. … Solaris 10 (not OpenSolaris) doesn’t like SATA DVD drives. Since the motherboard has no IDE drive, we are SOL there. But wait, can’t we use a nice shiny USB DVD drive? No dice. Doesn’t work. … ok What about a PXE boot load? Lets make it nice and simple.

[update] This was a PCI contention issue. Customers original code and test cases did not tickle this performance feature.. Their next code did. ConnectX was designed to handle codes of the latter type. Its also quite dangerous to take as gospel any of the output of diagnostic programs without their context. And if you are a vendor, and you have a customer reporting things like this, have a careful look at what they are doing.

Few details. My wife heard a report from an eye-witness to it. Nothing concrete yet, nothing I can definitively report. What was told to me was that the incident was in the concourse, security tried to apprehend someone, and they were eventually walked out. I also heard something about a police officer carrying something “with wires hanging out”. Hopefully we will hear something soon.

Our webstore has been a good thing for us to implement, it has driven purchases (more indirectly than directly). But it is somewhat hard to maintain, and causes significant issues when we want to update it. Moreover, its not sufficiently flexible that people can configure specific systems on it, such as siCluster. So we are revamping it. Rethinking some of the basic bits. Hopefully these bits of re-thinking will result in a better experience for everyone.

I’ll have the full set of numbers soon from the tests our customer was running on their shiny new JR4 (they agreed to let us talk about them). One of the more interesting take-aways is that the 24 drive unit appears to provide something a bit north of 5000 IOPs in a number of the random tests, doing seeks on files larger than ram. I need to think this through somewhat.

No … seriously. I solved 2 long standing issues today, one for an internal system now running 12 cores and 32 GB ram (needed a bios update), and the other was fixing the ()&&%%$^%(*& problems with a set of GA180 cards. I dunno, I think the issue is that I have ample time to think without interruption. The family is off swimming (wish I were with them), but getting this done is important.

List of things they changed is long. Some major ones … some … I dunno … bad ideas mebbe? like Grub2? Like incompatibilities with various motherboards (struggling with this right now on a home machine rebuild). Like unchangable login windows, and crappy icons for power, mail, volume, unchangable options in gnome … the xorg config debacle. I could go on. The big one is the nVidia issue. Install restricted drivers. Sure.

Weофис обзавеждане are developing some marketing materials and pages for our siCluster systems. Also some new internal benchmark reports on JackRabbit, DeltaV, and other tools. Also, we have some contracts we are working on to supply some new benchmarks of some announced/delivered and announced/not-currently shipping chips. Have a variety of new things showing up in the lab … would love to have the time to play with them … will start our automated testing bits for now.

We are often asked what differentiates us from our competition. One of the more important aspects is our raw uncompromising performance. Our systems are fast. Not in a marketing number sense (I’ll get to this in a minute). But in real application fast. We take a no holds barred approach to performance design. And our customers do see this. Design, implementation, … these are critical elements. Software stack, tuning …. these are critical.