Sometimes … sometimes … helpful utilities are helpful. Like installation systems that present the raw hardware with drivers to me, and let ME decide what I want to do with them. Unfortunately … I often run head first into bad choices made by the installer coders or architects. Dm-raid is one of these cases. It is very hard to disable it from a Centos install. Very hard. Pretty close to damn near impossible.

I did a few interviews, ranging from bloggers through journalists. This interview is one of the mix. By all means, please do go to their site and see it, and their text around it. I had much more to say, this is an edited down version. Basically I ran the Kx kdb+ demo, the dd demo, and a few other demos while talking. Doug was off on my right, probably laughing at me as I jumbled some things up … The hand bit?

Sage Weil has posted on this. Ceph is distributed file system, with an MDS, and a few other things, that looks quite interesting. Not necessarily on the high performance side, but on the simple object storage side. The client going in to 2.6.33 could be quite interesting. Pay attention to Ceph. Think of Lustre, without the nasty kernel requirements on server and client, and with in-kernel support. Including Ceph within the kernel (the second!

This is related to an issue we ran in to, today, and several other times. It sounds strange, but if you maintain rigid control over a huge swath of your stack, you run a fairly serious risk of being unable to respond to changing environments as quickly as your competition. The law of un-intended consequences bites you, fairly hard. Worse, you rarely, if ever, realize it, until it is too late.

We had a bunch of parts overnighted so we could start building some machines. Turns out one critical part for mounting the heat sinks was missing. If that part doesn’t arrive tomorrow, we’ll have to do a work around near term, and worst case, use a slightly different MB/mount for this, as we have that part for that MB. Do-able for this unit, but annoying as all heck. And of course it is time critical.

XKCD comic from a few days ago .. [ ](http://www.xkcd.com/) reminds me of the spherical horse joke I used to tell … For those not in the know, physicists like to reduce complex problems to simpler problems, solve the simpler problem … so when designing a faster race-horse, why not make the horse spherical rather than its equine shape, figure out what slows down a spherical horse, then that should be similar for the equine shaped horse … right?

I had a chance to look at the perl 6 advent calendar. What caught my eye was yesterdays post. In it, meta operators are explained. So here is a common HPC pattern, a reduction operation. Say a sum reduction. Suppose you want to sum up the values in some vector A. In Perl, A would be represented by a list, @a. To get the sum over the elements, you can do this: $sum = [+] @a; which means apply the sum operator “+”, between elements of the list.

See the day job site for details soon (next week?) for the posting.

We passed an important milestone today. Well, ok, we passed it earlier in the week. But this is our best year to date on record. And the year isn’t over … still 28 days left ….

The day job pushed the announcement which went into the SC09 PR black hole out the door today. Also, the first installation is also indicated in the next announcement … Scalable Informatics Introduces siCluster, an Innovative and Highly Scalable Performance Storage Cluster Canton, MI, Dec 2, 2009 - Scalable Informatics Inc., a provider of innovative high performance storage and computing solutions, announces the availability of their new siCluster??? storage cluster product (http://scalableinformatics.