For the day job … We are happy about joining this group. Interest in our high performance storage and computing systems continues to grow across multiple sectors. As users need to store and process exponentially growing amounts of data, they need systems, fabrics and designs capable of scaling without introducing additional barriers. This group represents those that build and those that use such technology.

Ohio Linux Fest is September 25-27, 2009 in Columbus OH this year. Sadly we won’t be going. The major reason we won’t be going is we plan to be at (or driving to) a customer site during that weekend. We are building a storage cluster for this customer, and we will be talking about it soon. The secondary reason is we are looking to more carefully deploy our marketing budget. There is a possibility of sharing a booth with a partner at SC09, and we don’t have an infinitely deep marketing budget, so I have to make choices.

dmraid is a technology to turn on-board fake-RAID (fRAID) systems into usable/bootable linux machines. It works for what it does, but you do need to be careful, as many of the fRAID chipsets have interesting … er … features. Yeah. Thats it, features. mdadm is a pure software version, requiring no assist from the bios. It can handle setting up RAID devices, and is our preferred way of creating RAID in software.

Been meaning to do this for a while. Of course, after I did this, the DB broke. And then I had to fix that. Ok, the DB itself didn’t break, but the install of it did. Long story, not worth telling. Punchline: with some RPM and yum commands, I eradicated the evil bits and allowed the good bits to prevail. Yeah, I know, I should just virtualize the box and run it where-ever.

I read an article a few weeks ago that mirrors some of the things I’ve said in the past about computing on huge systems. Basically, when you have a system of sufficiently large size, the communications fabric between the nodes are such that for any ith and jth node, the latencies and transit times may not be uniform, or worse, there may be significant time cost to communicate between various nodes.

* I just added myself to [http://twitr.org](http://twitr.org) Twitter Directory under #[hpc](http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23hpc) #[storage](http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23storage) #[accelerated](http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23accelerated) [#](http://twitter.com/sijoe/statuses/3755531868) Powered by Twitter Tools

I had a laugh when I read Professor Robert Smith?’shome page (the question mark is really there). Ok … imagine having a thesis advisor like this … Man that would be fun research! Shawn of the dead as source material … Seriously, …he has a paper on Zombie modeling, and the first few pages I glanced through, I actually think I understood. His focus is epidemiology. This is certainly something worthwhile, and it appears that the zombie modeling is using zombie as a placeholder for some unknown infectious disease with specific characteristics.

Get ready to laugh a little … landman@metal:~$ dd if=/dev/zero of=big-huge-file-system-target.img bs=1k seek=2T count=1 1+0 records in 1+0 records out 1024 bytes (1.0 kB) copied, 4.4349e-05 s, 23.1 MB/s landman@metal:~$ ls -alF big-huge-file-system-target.img -rw-r--r-- 1 landman landman 2251799813686272 2009-09-04 17:25 big-huge-file-system-target.img landman@metal:~$ ls -alhF big-huge-file-system-target.img -rw-r--r-- 1 landman landman 2.1P 2009-09-04 17:25 big-huge-file-system-target.img 2.1PB file … eh ? Not so much … landman@metal:~$ ls -aslhF big-huge-file-system-target.img 4.0K -rw-r--r-- 1 landman landman 2.

Doug Eadline has an e-book out. From the posting on Beowulf: It appears to be Windows/Mac only though (not Doug’s fault, don’t blame him). Hopefully a sane version (e.g. PDF) will be generated soon. Doug is, of course, the chief monkey at Cluster Monkey, and an all around good guy.

This article is right on the money. Yeah, sounds about right. The states' 21st century fund is “investing” in buggy whips … advanced manufacturing, homeland security, energy, and biotech. Which are things that this state is not know for. But the “investments” are poorly done, which might even be an optimistic view of them, with the focus areas, and investment process being … well … not well thought out. Politically, it plays well to various interests.