For those who don’t know what nyble is … you can read an old post here. The short version is that it gives you an always reproducible bootable ramdisk (or stateful if you need) image (installation for stateful folk). You avoid worrying about configuration drift, as you roll a new image in ~10-20 minutes, and turn a configuration management problem into a simpler image management problem. Which may be solved with a database backed booting system like, I dunno, tiburon with minio providing the data store.

In the world in which we reside, a pandemic slowly burns. This pandemic has confounded front line medical practitioners, public health organizations. It has exposed a number of troubling relationships amongst governments and organizations. It has resulted in numerous pronoucements of “X may work” from medically and scientifically illiterate political leaders. The problem is, fundamentally, there are no silver bullets. There are no magic cures. There is no replacement for the hard work required to devise safe and effective mitigations, and hopefully preventatives such as vaccines.

I’ve been playing with Julia for a while now. As the language is evolving quickly, I have to learn and relearn various aspects. Happily, since 1.0 dropped a while ago, its been more consistent, and the rate of change is lower than in the past. The Riemann ζ function is an interesting problem to test a number of mechanisms for parallelism with. The function itself is simple to write $$\zeta(a) = \sum_{i=1}^\infty \frac{1}{i^a}$$

(caution: I get personal at the end of this, you can see my motivation for working on this) I can’t talk in depth about it though, yet. I can talk in broad brush strokes for now. Imagine for a moment, that you have a combination of available high performance supercomputers, an urgent problem to be solved, and a collection of people, computing tools, and data. Imagine that you are one of many stages in this process, but you are, for the moment, a bottlenecking process.

As of the day this post is being written, a virus has been spreading globally. Details of the virus (SARS-CoV-2) and it’s spread (nCoV-19) are being discussed across the globe. There is much in the way of fear, and fear-inspired reactions. Visit any airport, and note the number of people wearing what amounts to ineffectual face masks. All the while, doctors are trying to get common sense messages out about prevention and preparation.

I am planning on getting back to a more regular cadence of writing. I enjoy it, and hopefully, I don’t annoy (all) readers. A brief retrospective on what has been over the last decade first. First, having experienced this first hand, its important to talk about the use pattern shifts. In 2010, cloud for HPC workloads wasn’t even an afterthought. Basically the large cloud provider (AWS) and the wannabes were building cheap machines and maximizing tenancy.

For those who aren’t aware, I had written (a long, long time ago) a simple IO benchmark test, when I had been displeased with the (at the time) standard tools. Since then fio has come out and been quite useful, though somewhat orthogonal to what I wanted to use. The new results are at the bottom, I’ll explain later. Let me explain. At a high level, you want your test runs on your IO system to place your system under heavy sustained load, to explore the holistic system behavior.

Often times, when we are working on a project with a well defined set of milestones, we’ll be asked to add something to the list of tasks. These asks may be simple and quick, or long and time consuming. One thing each ask does, is increase the scoping of the milestone, increase the risk surface, and add additional criterion to the milestone. This means, each ask needs careful thought on the net increase in risk versus the net increase in value, or net loss to opportunity cost by not acting on the ask.

Its been a while, I know. My apologies. Ok, first off, I’ve been very busy at the $dayjob. More in a later post. But I’ve been doing some code fix up for a number of my tools, specifically the net-tools collection. This one had nagged me a long time. Ok, here it is in a nutshell. The way lsnet worked, it used fixed sized columns for, unfortunately, variable sized fields.

I have to be quite careful to not discuss $dayjob stuff here. Which, as that consumes a large chunk of my daytime (a bit more than 8h/day), leaves me with precious little time for me. But I enjoy this position, and the company. It is nice to be part of an organization that values (deep) experience.