Why on earth would someone launch a DDoS against us (technically a domain we host)? It is in progress right now. Main attack vector is via email/spam bots. If anyone out there wants me to gather specific data on the attack, please let me know. Pretty good logging of most things here. According my trusty mail meter, we have repelled something like 0.2M emails in one day. Ballpark of 145 messages per minute.

[in his best Brooklyn accent] … and stuff happens. /. linked to a story on supercomputing procurement. The article is in the New York Times, and it is worth a read. Short version is that the procurement appears to have been decided 4 years in advance, and the NSF will give the DOE the machine. Well, this assumes that the reporting is in fact correct. My own experience with various media interactions tends to suggest that misquoting/rewording and semantic shift are the norm, not the exception.

Built a new 2.6.22.1 kernel. Testing it for many things. Looks good overall, though it broke a few things when I first built it. Had to get the latest subsystem patches. Ok. I decided to use this as “the” kernel for all we are working on. Dog-food it. Put it on my laptop as well. (BTW: if anyone out there knows how to force a driver into windows, I am trying to load the AHCI driver into XP, so I can switch the system into a much faster disk mode … Dell likes loading it in ATA mode, and it is slower as a result … worse, XP refuses to load the driver when presented with it … I need to force this to happen … pointers welcome … might just have to reload XP, but I would prefer to avoid the pleasure of doing this ….

I just picked up a Verizon Wireless PCMCIA air card to go with the new Dell laptop. The HPC connection comes from this being the unit I take with me on-site. The wireless card is a PCMCIA unit, the PC5750. It is basically a PCMCIA -> USB bridge for a modem. I installed the Verizon software in the windows XP portion (didn’t check to see if it works in XP x64, which I had been still considering reloadingPfennige bezitzen einen zu hohen wertlos Charakter und poker spiel.

I got an interesting letter in the mail today. It was a somewhat … well … cheesy looking letter from the USPTO (US Patent and Trademark office) indicating that a patent which was applied for 7 years ago, was finally awarded. Patent number 7,249,357 if you are interested. I won’t comment on the substance of the patent. The group I worked with was absolutely top notch, and an it was an honor to be associated with them.

Sorry folks, huge demand for my cycles. Has effectively stopped me from having time to write the followup bits. Will do soon.

One of the more annoying parts of writing stuff for consumption online is that, every now and then, someone with an agenda, a very obvious agenda, will go off with weak arguments. One of those weak arguments that we saw yesterday was TCO. Not that TCO is a minor concern, it is a real, significant concern for management. How much something costs in the end is a sorely needed datum for any enterprise, company, entity, to make rational and realistic decisions.

Yesterday, I commented on a puff piece article on Windows CCS. Go ahead and read it, the article and the commentary. This morning, I saw a comment on this same article from John at InsideHpc.com. I disagreed with John’s premise, and wrote a long article discussing this. While I respect John, I do disagree with him. But I will do so respectfully. The rest of this article will be … sarcastic … flippant … and I am going to fisk the fisking post that was derived from John’s on another site.

Robin at Storagemojo (great blog, read it religiously) says he had heard a rumor. Yeah, I should invoke the 24 hour rule. If you are at Crosswalk, and it is still going, please let him (and me) know. Robin makes a great point there Well, ok, I take a little issue with it in that the performance driven folks now realize that stability is critical to performance. Scaling up on a bleeding edge is a sure way to have lots of down time.

John West asks this question in a short article on HPCWire. In it he posits a few things. It is worth looking into them. First, his title is provocative, “Windows CCS and the End of *nix in HPC”. Not that this is an issue, he needs to draw readers in. Second, he shows what he is interpreting to be the fundamental conflict, that is, between end users who just want to get things done, as typified in his quote from the person who bought a windows cluster, and Don Becker, who did a pretty good job of jump starting the industry.