Oh no … we didn’t say “face melting” … did we? Oh. Yes. We. Did. The interview is here at the always wonderful InsideHPC.com You can see the video itself here on YouTube, but read Rich’s transcript. I was losing my voice, and he captured all of the interview in text. Take home messages: Insane IO/Networking/processing performance, small footprint, tiny price, available for orders now.

Assuming everything goes as planned (HA!) we should have a number of very cool things at SC15. * 100Gb [Unison storage system with BeeGFS](https://scalableinformatics.com/unison) * 100Gb [Unison Ceph](https://scalableinformatics.com/unison) system * 100Gb connection to a partner/customer booth * Forte 100Gb is awesome. The first time I ran an iperf bidirectional test, saw 20GB/s … it blew me away. 40/56GbE is old hat now, and 10GbE is in the rapidly receding past.

I mentioned previously that we have some new (shiny) things … and it looks like you’ll be able to hear about them at my talk. See the schedule for timing information. This said, please note that we have a terrific line up of people giving talks: Fintan Quill from Kx on kdb+ … which is an awesome market leading Big Data Time Series analytics and database tool that runs absolutely balls-out insanely fast on our architecture Christian Mohrbacher from Thinkparq on BeeGFS … the primary parallel file system we are leveraging for Unison parallel file system appliances * Mark Nelson from Inktank/Red Hat on Ceph … the reliable block and object storage system that we’ve built into our Unison Object/Block Storage appliance * Doug Eadline from Basement Supercomputing on Hadoop, and likely showing a Limulus deskside Hadoop appliance * Phil Mucci from Minimal Metrics on optimization problems for systems and code.

Report XTR141111 was just released by STAC Research for the M3 benchmarks. We are absolutely thrilled, as some of our records were bested by newer versions of our hardware with newer software stack. Congratulations to Lucera, STAC Research for getting the results out, and the good folks at McObject for building the underlying database technology. This result continues and extends Scalable Informatics domination of the STAC M3 results. I’ll check to be sure, but I believe we are now the hardware side of most of the published records.

Here’s the basic theory behind swap space. Memory is expensive, disk is cheap. Only use the faster memory for active things, and aggressively swap out the less used things. This provides a virtual address space larger than physical/logical memory. Great, right? No. Heres why. swap makes the assumption that you can always write/read to persistent memory (disk/swap). It never assumes persistent memory could have a failure. Hence, if some amount of paged data on disk suddenly disappeared, well … Put another way, it increases your failure likelihood, by involving components with higher probability of failure into a pathway which assumes no failure.

Scalable’s booth is #3053. We’ll have some good stuff, demos, talks, and people there. And coffee. Gotta have the coffee. More soon, come by and visit us!

Ok. Lets call this an absolutely wild ride so far. I mean, its freaking insane. I cannot remember working so hard and so fast. First off Tiburon, our cluster software package (designed mostly for HPC Storage, and cluster like things) has been an insanely awesome trouper. It just works. And I mean that in a jaw dropping manner. It just freaking works. Part of it may be due to the simplicity of the thing.

This took me a while to post in part due to heavy year end load, but also, that I wanted to think through what I did see, and what I didn’t. It is important in many processes to take a moment, step back from where you are, and try to assemble the bigger picture of the situation. This introspection can yield invaluable insights. Failing to do it can blind you to what was there, with you focusing mostly on the minutae.

Well, this is the day we had to leave. We saw many things, met many people, had many good conversations. Oddly enough we did not have time to attend talks. I sat in on one BOF. Here is what I observed. IBM is pushing Blue Gene everywhere. In the sessions I did see or hear about from others, it appears that IBM operatives/employees were trying to make a case, even when told that infinite speed wasn’t the issue.

We had wanted to see several of the sessions including the ClawHmmer, and various others. I spent most of my time talking with various vendors and others on the show floor. ClawHmmer is interesting as it is a GPU version of HMMer, and on good GPU hardware, you can get quite a performance boost on HMMer. The only problem we see is that most servers don’t have good hardware accelerated GPUs.

This morning, SC'05 featured a keynote address from Bill Gates, CTO and founder of Microsoft. Prior to the keynote, we watched a video loop, and we heard from the heads of the ACM, and the president-elect of the IEEE, as well as the chairperson of the board for SC'06 in Tampa Florida. The president-elect gave a good and short talk on a number of things, including the need to get more women and minorities into the profession.

At 7pm PST the network was officially lit with the_ traditional cutting of the optical fibre_, then a ribbon was cut with a large pair wooden handled scissors. Long lines were formed, and much food was consumed. The best thing I saw at the show today is the LightSpace Technology display. The molecular display demo is great, as was the visual human work. The way it works is a very bright digital light pipe technology coupled with diffusive planes for drawing images.

The Sun HPCC group had some nice talks from folks doing real science. Specifically I did get to see a talk on path-integral formalism of molecular dynamics, another on using support vector machines for feature identification in patients with Glaucoma. Also saw quite a bit of stuff we cannot talk about, but it was quite interesting. All in all, a fun time was had by all, but we cannot post pictures as most of the bits were under non-disclosure.

Got here… finally. Seattle is largely sold out of hotel rooms, so I had to get rooms near the airport. Only a short drive to the conference. Could be worse. Weather is cool (a.k.a freezing for those from warmer climates) and wet. The car rental person started telling me all about how many times his car was smashed into, right after I declined the extra coverage… Hmmm…. Maybe that old axiom is in place, the selling starts when the customer says “no”.

So there should be lots of folks at SC05 to answer questions about technology, products, performance, TCO, and most anything else connected with supercomputing you could want to ask. Some questions I want to ask are from the good folks at Microsoft (Bill Gates is giving the opening keynote), what specifically their HPC initiative is supposed to give us that we don’t already have? This is not an OS war, or OSS zealotry, just a simple question as to what their offering will bring to the table.

Much has changed in a year. Last year, a number of companies such as Orion were on the rise and the darlings of the event. Companies such as my former employer SGI had a strong presence, reasonable revenues, and there were thoughts of a possible turn around. Startups that garnered far less attention than they deserved, such as Ammasso were there in a limited fashion. Other startups (mercifully unamed) that had something of a flash-in-the-pan quality to them seemed abundant.