First is the news that the merger may be running afoul of the European regulators. It would be a (terminal) disaster for Sun if it did. Their revenues continue to crater quarter after quarter. Customers do not like uncertainty. The rationale for this is reduction in competition in the DB market. Because of MySQL. Which, if you read other technical blogs and news sources for MySQL, Sun seems to have managed to piss off their community of users and contributers.

Yes this is a loaded question. The context I use is a very simple double precision floating point loop, with the interior re-written to use SSE2. The idea is, if we run the identical program on the same machine, running one core, doing little else but double precision FP operations (in this case, computing the Riemann Zeta Function), with very little to no memory traffic … which CPU core will win on this very simple sprint?

According to LWN (what, you’re not a subscriber? For shame!) Redhat EL 5.4 came out. With a long awaited feature. XFS. Redhat, its about time. It was added into the kernel … what … 8 years ago?

Should be fun, and I’ll talk more about it later on. Expect to see some interesting test case benchmarks start coming from us on this.

Reported on the Inquirer site. The claim is that this deal would complement the EDS services business. Hmmm…. HP could take (and is taking) Sun’s business for effectively free. Why would they pay for something they can get for free? Something just doesn’t ring true about this, and I’d chalk this rumor up to more wishful thinking on the part of some of the reporters sources. Never mind the regulatory hurdles HP would have to go through as one of the top hardware vendors.

An article on softpedia discusses the state of the windows/linux client and server markets. I can personally attest to seeing Microsoft scrambling to try to turn every Linux opportunity into a windows win, but I am not sure they completely grasp what they are up against. This article amplifies this. While I take issue with some of their wording … many customers we know are using Linux, free or paid subscription … precisely for the critical business needs, due to the control and cost issues.

This is for a customer who wants to run a benchmark today. Wish we had a JackRabbit in the lab, but our engineering machine is at a customer site. One “blade” of a “CX1” with 3.2 GHz Nehalem’s, 24 GB ram (about to bump this to 72 GB for customer benchmark), an SDR Infiniband connection (1GB/s max). DeltaV3 (ΔV3) with an 8 disk RAID6 (6 data drives, maximum read speed of about 660 MB/s), and a 6 disk RAID10 (not being used for this test).

See here. DataSynapse, for those who don’t know, makes tools that help financial services folks schedule work across large clusters. They are pretty big on wall street. They are now going to be part of Tibco. Competitors are Platform et al. As this Great Recession marches on, I do expect to see additional M&A; activity, in order to strengthen portfolios, provide capability enhancement, and so forth. It all comes down to cost-benefit analysis.

It was reported earlier this week that Oracle received an OK from US DOJ to acquire Sun. A new article suggests the reason for the speed. How bad was it? This isn’t quite a cratering … unless you consider the last several quarters in a row. And this is because customers aren’t dumb, they know proprietary gear needs support (ignore the marketing … if you can’t buy the same bits on the open market from more than one source, it is proprietary).

Banging my head against this one. OpenMPI 1.3.x is IMO one of the best MPI stacks available. It makes my life easy in many regards, and most of the time, it just works. Gridengine is a venerable job scheduler, albeit one that hasn’t done a great job with MPI integration in the past. I remember writing reaper scripts to clean up after MPICH1/2 runs for various customers. Tight integration as it is called, didn’t work that well.