Ohio Linux Fest

I was down at OLF with a JackRabbit and a Pegasus workstation. The rest of the booths had filled up, so they placed us near the coffee. Lets see, coffee, IT people … Hmmm…. They musta liked us ! Some friends helped out getting the mini booth up. I put out some pens, 150 JackRabbit pages (couldn’t possibly burn through those, right? I figured we would get rid of 20 or so at best). Was I wrong.

On Pegasus (its a many-core workstation, lots of ram, ample computing power, at a very reasonable price) we had VMware server running a demo copy of Windows XP Pro 64 with 2 CPUs and 2 GB ram, a movie (a legitimate one I have email/written permission to use from the group that created it), and some other bits. On the JackRabbit, I had bonnie++, IOzone, and a few other things. Well, I was constrained for time before leaving, I had to drive from Michigan to Columbus in the morning (3.5 hour drive) to get there by 8am to set up the booth. You do the math, I was tired … made worse by teaching the MPI class the day before (not that that was bad, it is just very exhausting). … It started out brisk. Someone from the beowulf list showed up, and another helped me set up the booth. Some LUG members from my local area also provided invaluable assistance in getting everything done. I talked about JackRabbit and about Pegasus. People loved the JackRabbit pricing. They asked about performance, so I showed them. Turns out groups started coming over having lots of trouble believing the numbers, so I showed them. And more came, and more, and … Did I mention that being by the coffee was a good thing? It was lots of fun, and apart from the one EMC consultant who badmouthed SATA/PATA (and then left in a huff after I decimated his performance arguments with a simple demonstration), it was a rewarding experience.