Every now and then we see people declare themselves to be the king of the hill in performance or in some other metric of relevance. Then come the theoretical max numbers or their measurements. As a reminder, our single JR4 units are sustaining 2.3+ GB/s to and from disk for TB sized files, and have QDR IB type connections (as well as 10GbE and GbE) available. Lots of bandwidth per box.

We delivered our first siCluster-NAS unit to a government customer. Built it and delivered it. In 8 days. From parts. Just got back this afternoon. SC10 coming up, and we will be there. Intel Partner Pavilion, Monday and Tuesday. Up to meet with people on Wednesday/Thursday, so ping me if you’d like to get together.

Ever have a day like this: Me: You need the wheels on the car to be able to drive it off the lot Them: Nonesense. They cost extra. We don’t need them. (hours/days/weeks/months later) Them: How come you didn’t tell us we need wheels? All I can think to do is to blink rapidly without saying anything.

this is why I haven’t been doing any posting … preparing for SC10, building a new siCluster-NAS (scale out NAS unit) for a government customer, dealing with shipping units to Chile, new orders for other units …, meeting with partners and prospective partners, generating quotes like mad … Yeah … busy … :)

* Is #[twitter](http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23twitter) broke? I keep getting "internal server errors" [#](http://twitter.com/sijoe/statuses/29523254356) * Congrats @[RickForMI](http://twitter.com/RickForMI) ... early call, but it looks like you are the new governor of the state of Michigan [#](http://twitter.com/sijoe/statuses/29523344742) Powered by Twitter Tools

трапезни масиSaw this, this morning. There was news over the past few weeks of tax avoidance strategies by Google and others. Criticism appears to have been muted at the political level, where they are avid funders of elected official’s re-election bids. Go figure. But this article points out some of the real details behind the headlines, and talks about job creation in general. Something that #RickForMI is likely painfully aware of (assuming he wins governor race tomorrow).

Yeah, I know, the web page says its under heavy development. And its on disk format can change. And its mailing list is chock full of patches. But it passed our stability test. 100 iterations (3.2TB written/read in all and compared to checksums) of the following fio test case. [global] size=8g iodepth=32 blocksize=1m numjobs=4 nrfiles=1 ioengine=vsync rw=write [sw1] create_serialize=0 create_on_open=1 #directory=/data directory=/mnt/btrfs verify=crc32c-intel verify_async=8 group_reporting This is our baseline test.

Go figure. Between 6 and 3 years ago, when we were pitching HPC accelerators to VCs, trying to convince them that it was inevitable that supercomputing was going this route, we (optimistically) predicted that the worlds fastest machine would be Accelerator Processing Unit (APU) based in 2012. Well, we were wrong. November 2010 is the correct answer. My expectation is that many HPC systems (probably most) will have some sort of APU technology (GPUs, vector extensions, Larabee like things, Tilera like things).

Interesting results thus far, but not quite what I expected. Doing our acid test (reading and writing 8 threads of 8GB each for 64GB per read/write test, 100 times, with crc checking turned on). If btrfs doesn’t crash the kernel, and doesn’t start tossing CRC errors, yeah, its safe to use then (though we will throw the real octobonnie and hexadecabonnie loads at it).

SC10 prep, machine builds/tests, quotes, yadda yadda … Will have a number of posts up soon, in the next few days.