Names not used to protect the guilty. We have a motherboard that we bought about 2 years ago now. It was used to run 5310 processors for a build machine for a while. Well, the fist motherboard we had from them, while advertised as compatible with quad core … wasn’t. We had to RMA it to get the right version from this vendor. Well, we had to upgrade the bios recently to support a new card we placed in the machine.

Yeah … thats what is being reported in the Freep. I haven’t looked at the latest moneytree numbers from PWC, but from what the author reports, Yup. You got it. And more to the point, all of the “big winners” here … are already funded companies. That is, new company formation, with a VC/Angel assist, is not happening at a pace worthy of mentioning. Specifically I think they call this … the long tail.

Yeah, this is sounding more and more like a Yahoo-redux. So who will play the part of Jerry Yang? According to a report from the Triangle Business Journal, The journal was summarizing a CNBC report, which I hadn’t seen. In these cases, played out in public, unless one party gives a good reason for not resuming negotiating, they are basically holding out to see what the other party will sweeten the deal with.

someone was apparently looking at our Pegasus GPU+Cell box spec’s online … and told their friends. Most of the comments were ok, though someone thinks this is not a deskside/desktop box. They wrote: Heh … Won’t dispute the low production piece … we are not making millions of them. As for a desktop computer? That is most assuredly what this is. See for yourself … Now imagine throwing even more cores and GPUs at it.

Well, I wrote a cluster top a while ago, and just installed it for a customer whose cluster we are burning in right now. This is an office cluster … 48 cores, has to be pretty darned silent, as it is going into an office environment. User needs to see whats running on the cluster. Top is a great interface to this. ctop is getting better. ctop v0.25: by Scalable Informatics http://www.

Yahoo news points to an article on Reuters news service, where it quotes unnamed people familiar with the situation. Very short article, looks more like a backchannel communication method saying “come back, we really do want you to court us”. I would imagine that some shareholders … er … expressed their rather positions, rather emphatically … to Sun’s board. I am sure quite a bit of heat was generated, until the relevant people saw the light.

I could say that using a JackRabbit for high performance storage is sorta like this … :) Something like this is on my mind when I write about our test tracks, and cracking the throttle wide open..

Just read this today at the Reg. Argonne has lots of GPUs, and disks. Separated with a big old IB fabric. Hmmm…. 10,000 disks to get 80,000,000,000 B/s. Hmmm…. Delivering that to GPUs. Hmmm…. I think we can do better. Just 80 of our JR4 units can certainly read and write at that speed, and we can get them 2 GPUs in the same box as the disks. 160 GPUs (Tesla’s at that).

In this article, the author covers some of what CRL is doing with Eka (pronounced eh-kch). There are some interesting points: Not sure I agree that it is the first time a corporate institution is doing this … others have been there before, and some are continuing, such as Tsunamic Technologies. This said, the other point is very much on target. Most of the governmental backed/based HPC providers are doing so, specifically to further their research.

Of course, this is all premature … windows 7 could turn out to be the greatest thing since sliced bread … though honestly, I doubt it. Information week reports that 83% of corporate customers do not plan a windows 7 deployment in the first year of availability. Moreover, most are … happy … with XP, and will continue to use it, as they are concerned with application compatibility. That is quite interesting, but not terribly surprising.