We no longer do try and buy programs. We’ve found that customers would use our unit to lever our competitors down in price, and extract additional concessions from them. Just walk them by our box with the blinkenlights, and the nice logos … scared quite a few sales reps into submission. Then we get our box back after the other vendor is suitably scared. There’s no upside for us, at all.

This is about scalability in processes and administration of programs, not really HPC. Last month, I took advantage of cash 4 clunkers. I got rid of a car I swore to drive into the ground (which I nearly did). In 4 days, the government is finally admitting, it had 250k transactions. The dealerships were crowded. The websites, which were the font of all information and arrangements? Basically massively overloaded. Fast forward to today, where I saw this article.

… are greatly exaggerated. John at InsideHPC has an article on Cisco’s move out of Infiniband which refers to another article on this. I have to basically say, I’ll believe 10GbE conquering IB when I see it. Every year is proclaimed to be the year that IB is vanquished by 10GbE. I was reporting on this stuff 2+ years ago, and asked very simple questions just last year. When will 10GbE come into its own in HPC?

generating many quotes, finalizing bits on storage cluster wins (you’ll hear about this soon), taking orders, starting several benchmark and support efforts, speaking to a group to help us get started raising capital. Busy busy busy …

First off, it appears that the zypper problem is solved. Zypper shares some similer command line bits with yum. This helped with a faster learning curve. Zypper also supports a feature I wish were in yum, but I use grep for. zypper search gcc and yum list | grep gcc are the same in function. Zypper is also much faster than yum. Interpreted languages don’t work so well with large data sets, such as many installation packages, and dense dependency trees they have to construct and traverse.

Ok, we had to use our 2.6.27.9 kernel, but it works fine otherwise. This looks like a reasonable solution to the customers problem. Will be able to reload most of their compute nodes remotely, the head node may be more complex. I need to see if binaries compiled on OpenSuSE 10.2 will work w/o problem on OpenSuSE 11.1. I suspect so, but the Ubuntu 8.xx and 9.xx used different glibc/gcc bits and caused a few hiccups for some apps.

It seems that yum, a reasonably good, quite standard, and powerful tool for maintaining systems across Redhat/Centos, Fedora, and multiple other distributions … was deprecated in SuSE in favor of an “Invented Here” tool such as zypper. I am running into this right now with attempting to get OFED installed on OpenSUSE 11.1 to see if this will solve a customer problem. Yum is a convenient and powerful tool, common across many distros.

I thought this was interesting. Microsoft basically pulling a plug on a large project over tax issues, and moving its capability to where it has a more favorable situation. I see a simple (and dare I say obvious) evolution in the cloud infrastructure landscape. Take your container systems, put them on a truck and drive them to where the taxes are best. This would create demand for points of presence with good power and network connections.

Been very busy … good busy … but busy. Brief T&C; discussion, as this is near and dear to my heart right now. We find lots of variation in T and C documentation. Some of it is reasonable, some is simply ridiculous. Call it onerous, call it egregious. The vast majority of the ridiculous language focuses on providing a huge lever over the seller by the buyer. Some of my favorites are “we can return it if we want, for any reason, and you have no recourse whatsoever”, “you will pay for our costs if we decide to go another route”, “you may not charge fees for late payment, or institute collection actions”, “you will give us most preferred customer pricing, regardless of how little we buy from you”, and “we will pay when we please”.

* @[garystiehr](http://twitter.com/garystiehr) Doug did a good job on them. We are getting many hits from #[insideHPC](http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23insideHPC) for #[storage](http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23storage) for #[HPC](http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23HPC) systems now [in reply to garystiehr](http://twitter.com/garystiehr/statuses/3119965913) [#](http://twitter.com/sijoe/statuses/3134050087) * fighting battles I should not be fighting ... [#](http://twitter.com/sijoe/statuses/3134391117) * Done with one proposal, now onto an analysis, a letter of support for a proposal, a CV for the proposal, a patent analysis ... its only 11pm [#](http://twitter.com/sijoe/statuses/3138092256) Powered by Twitter Tools.