IBM is acquiring Netezza for $1.7B USD. This can be an interesting play in massive OLAP and BI. both of which resist calling themselves HPC, but most definitely are. M&A; is continuing to heat up folks. The big guys are buying the little guys. [update] … and of course there is weirdness … according to a lawsuit, Netezza allegedly reverse engineered someone else’s product … incorrectly at that … and sold it to its customers.

We should replicate it here. From the article. I’ve mentioned it many times, but the primary driver of significant sea changes are cost issues. Cloud and open source are both mechanisms for reducing desktop application costs. Similar pressures are in place in HPC. Cloud HPC is currently mostly an overflow computing model, with some folks using it for primary computing. I expect more to start using these for primary computing, along with their super desktops.

Not gross, but if you are a little squeamish, don’t click the picture for the big one. Here’s the small image. [ ](http://scalability.org/images/joes_hand_broken_marked.jpg) The green arrows, hand drawn by me, should show the two problems. First is on the left of the image, a chunk of the knuckle has been broken off. Yeah, that hurts. But the other arrow, on the right hand side, explains why it hurts when it is straight.

Java and its connection to browsers break. Now normally, I wouldn’t care, as I don’t personally have a very high opinion of the be-all-and-end-all language/system known as java. Its overly verbose, under performing, and doesn’t play well with any operating system. Copy/paste buffers … well, there is a whole huge litany of issues with it, and I am not even remotely the only one who has them. Updated desktop OS. Now at Ubuntu 10.

There are costs to taking specific actions, there are risks, and there may be benefits. Here is an example of a risk (or cost) Q: what do you get when you spar (e.g. fight in a controlled manner so as to work on technique) with a 3rd dan (3rd degree blackbelt), and then mess up on a kick block? A: a broken middle finger on the right hand So typing is now hunt and peck.

If you listen to IDC talk about HPC, they will talk about “the missing middle”, which is basically a marketing term for a market segment that isn’t being well addressed by HPC vendors with clusters. It is being addressed by some (hint: the day job) in a variety of ways. An article at InsideHPC by Rich Brueckner gave it a good contextual background, in terms of historical trends in HPC tending to favor the lower cost deployments of processing power.

I wonder if the reason there are so many bad benchmarks and incorrect conclusions drawn from bad benchmarks comes, to some significant level, from a basic misunderstanding of measurement, how to perform them, and what you are measuring. Several years ago, we watched folks who should know better, insist that 2GB bonnie++ data (the 2GB file size) was the only relevant one for their storage systems and it told them everything they needed to know about storage.

Here. In it, the author makes a number of points. Some I take no issue with, or don’t have direct knowledge of. Others … Erp … You only get the “faster” speeds with easily compressible data. You get the far slower speeds when the data isn’t so easy to compress. We know. We measured this, and observed it. If you write all zeros, just like in the days when compilers special cased particular codes (cough cough), its possible disks don’t even do the writes.

The OEM went silent. We reported the issues, opened RMAs. To say I am not pleased … well … These are Corsair CMFSSD-32D1 units. According to their site Ummm … no. Not even close. We are experiencing about a 70% failure rate, within 3 months of acquisition. In many different chassis, in many different parts of the world, with many different power supplies, many different motherboards. This is a time correlated failure.

busy busy busy busy ….