Its the day after. Detroit has had a 20+% unemployment rate for a while, exacerbated by many factors. It would be fair, and accurate to state that the city has been in a depression for a while. Well, the little “surgical” bankruptcy is having the ripple effects we knew it would. And it will likely take down several additional companies with it, that were under pressure, but not in terrible shape.

Chapter 11 filing today. Seems that the administration is thinking this will be a fast process. I think the creditors think otherwise. Chrysler may be worth more to them in a Chapter 7 liquidation than a Chapter 11 and section 363 scenario. What does this mean to HPC? Potentially lots. Chrysler, and all of its suppliers and partners use quite a bit of HPC. Keeps costs down. If they emerge, I expect them to use even more HPC.

I hit Ctrl-C while testing … the streaming write root@jr4:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=/data/big.file bs=16M count=20k oflag=direct ^C15081+0 records in 15081+0 records out 253017194496 bytes (253 GB) copied, 186.973 s, 1.4 GB/s … and the streaming read root@jr4:~# dd if=/data/big.file of=/dev/null bs=16M iflag=direct 10240+0 records in 10240+0 records out 171798691840 bytes (172 GB) copied, 99.0592 s, 1.7 GB/s Quite nice.

This one has a nice top output … <code> top - 13:36:58 up 7 min, 3 users, load average: 0.03, 0.04, 0.00 Tasks: 196 total, 1 running, 195 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu0 : 0.0%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni,100.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu1 : 0.0%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni,100.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu2 : 0.0%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni,100.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu3 : 0.0%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni,100.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu4 : 0.

Found this, this morning. As the US and the rest of the world take defibrillator paddles to the economy, and we hear mutterings of class warfare, it is interesting to hear similar sentiments expressed … globally … by the people doing the actual job creating. This link is the full story. Good read. I don’t have the nice car (I have a 13 year old Jeep), or the huge house. Still in growth mode.

Nope, haven’t been acquired. There is a lot of that going around though (and in some cases, rollups can do good in this market). We are now officially a Cray CX1 reseller (woot!!!) Since my SGI days, I’ve really enjoyed working with my Crayon colleagues. The funny thing is that many of the faces are the same. CX1 is a neat product, fits in well with what lots of our customers are doing.

Yowza … [root@dv3-of coreutils-7.2]# /opt/scalable/bin/dd if=/mnt/data/filesys1/xfs/t/big.file of=/dev/null bs=16M iflag=direct 807+0 records in 807+0 records out 13539213312 bytes (14 GB) copied, 13.2268 s, 1.0 GB/s Unit has 8 GB ram. Streaming writes are a bit slower (and direct IO not nearly as efficient for this RAID6). [root@dv3-of coreutils-7.2]# /opt/scalable/bin/dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/data/filesys1/xfs/t/big.file bs=16M count=2k 2048+0 records in 2048+0 records out 34359738368 bytes (34 GB) copied, 82.3577 s, 417 MB/s For laughs, lets re-read that 34 GB I just wrote out.

AMCC looks like they sold their 3ware raid bits to LSI on the 21st of April. 3ware is one of the major lower end RAID suppliers out there. They have a volume business, but like everyone, I suspect AMCC was falling on hard times, and needed to monetize its purchase of 3ware. What does this mean? Probably more consolidation in the storage market. 3ware built its own storage processors. LSI makes storage processors.

I have been quite critical of rPath. I believe rightly so. They make life far too hard for people who need to build code or kernel modules to live patch a system. The documentation for doing this stuff … really doesn’t exist. You are frankly, on your own. So I have spent hours trying to figure this out. And finally, came across the method to get builds to work. [root@dv3-of arcmsr]# conary update glibc:devel Including extra troves to resolve dependencies: glibc:devellib=2.

So I was thinking about how to work around the issues I found in OpenFiler. Basically the inability to upgrade drivers is the critical issue. Well, if OpenFiler never touches the hardware, this is much less of an issue. Bear with me. Basically, we sell JackRabbit as a server or an appliance, and pre-configure it so that our customers can pull it out of the box, stick it into the rack or on the floor, turn it on, and start working.