Story here. InsideHPC has been covering them for a while. Cilk was/is a different approach to parallelism than language developers traditionally used. Basically it deployed various work queues for each core, and the work queues decided when they needed more work. As I remember, they could “steal” from other work queues. The net effect of this was an effectively implicitly described parallelism. I am probably explaining it wrong. It is a neat way to work, but it is focused upon C++.

There is much being written about C4C (Cash for Clunkers). As I had noted in my own previous article, we did take advantage of it. So my writing is biased to some degree. I am personally opposed to wealth transfer as I noted. Those who busted their rear ends to make money ought to be able to keep it and spend it as they see fit. Barring that, if the government decides that stimulating a particular part of the economy is good, they can make things happen, in a big way.

This is more economic than HPC related, but it has a relationship to HPC as it turns out. Cash for clunkers was designed to replace lower MPG cars with higher MPG cars, by offering effectively a discount for purchase. The government allocated $1B to the program. It started Monday. As of today, Friday, the money is gone. Inventory was moved, it is no longer aging, Higher MPG cars are now on the roads.

Our 7-year business anniversary (from when we started) is in 2 days. We launched 1-August-2002, at the height of the internet bubble collapse. I took a golden handshake from my employer at the time and formed Scalable. Took the risk I had always been afraid of. 7 years ago. Amazing. Growing and profitable six out of the seven years since then. Yes, we may have a 7th anniversary sale. Contact us if you want details, or if you want to take advantage of it early.

Here. икони

I have never had as many problems directly caused by one application, across so many machines, across so many distributions, as NetworkManager. For those who don’t know, NetworkManager is your friendly helper application (mistakenly) adopted by distros to handle setting up networks. This would be well and good if it, I dunno, actually worked? I won’t recount my long painful history with it. Suffice it to say, everywhere I see it … everywhere … I immediately replace it with wicd.

In this past weeks HPCwire podcast, Chris Willard and Michael Feldman discuss many things. The business side of HPC, the future of companies, etc. I agreed with everything they said (having said it here in these pages in the past). That is, until the last minute. Thats where what they said doesn’t quite mesh with what we observe and are experiencing. Specifically, they suggesting that in these tough times, end users are being more conservative, sticking with the large vendors, and eschewing the smaller vendors.

I am seeing lots of deep soul searching in pundit circles, as well as head scratching on the part of customers, as various vendors writhe and contort in their death throes. Pundits regularly trash that which they neither grasp, nor prefer. Customers wonder what the right path going forward is. Vendors struggle to figure out what the market really wants, and to be able to offer that (all the while the marketing teams are spinning hard and fast).

Been running into a bit of this recently. Its usually preceded or followed with some sort of performance requirement, that ‘X’ just can’t hit, or they would need so much of ‘X’ that it blows their budget up. I find it interesting that the IT folks, the ones really worried about their futures due to budget cuts placing pressure on them to do more while spending less, really get our message, and grok what we do, and how we can help them achieve their mission goals while reducing their costs.

This was a long time coming. The previous management, prior to them sinking in april 2009, nor the management teams before that … going back at least 10 years, would never have done this. Its a shame. It should have happened long long ago. Basically Itanium is now legacy at SGI. I remember asking at some engineering/sales meeting what the plan B was. I remember the management blinking rapidly, but not giving an answer.