Many things are going on simultaneously right now, and I have little time to compose thoughts for the blog. I anticipate a bit of a letup in the next week or two as the year comes to a close.

Wordpress is an interesting beast. Spent hours working through issues that I shouldn’t have needed to on an upgrade, as some functions were deprecated. In an interesting way. By removing them, and throwing an error. Which I found only through looking at a specific log. So out goes that plugin. And the site is back.

Repo is here: https://github.com/joelandman/rzf. There’s a lightning talk to go along with it, and I’ll make sure I can get it together for this as well.

I’ve had numerous requests from friends and colleagues about whether I will be attending #SC17 this year. Sadly, this is not to be the case. $dayjob has me attending an onsite meeting that week in San Francisco, and the schedule was such that I could not attend the talks I was interested in. I’d love for there to be a way to listen to the talks remotely. Maybe I’ll simply buy the DVD/USB stick of the talks if there is an online store for them.

These are a collection of (MIT licensed) tools I’ve been working on for years to automate some of the major functionality one needs when setting up/using new machines with lots of disks/SSD/NVMe. The repo is here: https://github.com/joelandman/disk_test_setup . I will be adding some sas secure erase and formatting tools into this. These tools wrap other lower level tools, and handle the process of automating common tasks you worry about when you are setting up and testing a machine with many drives.

I’ve not heard of aria2c before today. Sort of a super wget as far as I could tell. Does parallel transfers to reduce data motion time, if possible. So I pulled it down, built it. I have some large data sets to move. And a nice storage area for them. Ok. Fire it up to pull down a 2GB file. Much faster than wget on the same system over the same network.

Nice machine we have here … root@hermes:/data/tests# lspci | egrep -i '(AMD|NVidia)' | grep VGA 3b:00.0 VGA compatible controller: <a href="http://www.pny.com/nvidia-quadro-gp100">NVIDIA Corporation GP100GL</a> (rev a1) 88:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] <a href="http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-radeon-vega-frontier-edition-16gb,5128.html">Vega 10 XTX</a> [Radeon Vega Frontier Edition] I want to see how tensorflow and many others run on each of the cards. The processor is no slouch either: root@hermes:/data/tests# lscpu | grep "Model name" Model name: Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 6134 CPU @ 3.

This was making the rounds last week. Oracle seems to have a leak in its process, creating labels that trigger event notifications for people, for their packages. Solaris was decimated. More details at the links and at The Layoff. Honestly I had expected them to reach this point. I am guessing that they were contractually obligated for at least 7 years to provide Solaris/SPARC support to US government purchasers. SGI went through a similar thing with IRIX.

First up, Tegile was acquired by Western Digital (WDC). This is in part due to WDC’s desire to be a one stop shop vertically integrated supplier for storage parts, systems, etc. This is how all of the storage parts OEMs needed to move, though Seagate failed to execute this correctly, selling off their array business in part to Cray. Toshiba … well … they have some existential challenges right now, and are about to sell off their profitable flash and memory systems business, if they can just get everyone to agree … This comes from the fact that spinning disk, while a venerable technology, has been effectively completely commoditized.

This was part of something else I’d worked on, but it never saw the light of day for a number of (rather silly) reasons. So rather than let these bits go to waste, I created a github repo for posterity. Someone might be able to make effective use of them somewhere. Repo is located here: https://github.com/joelandman/msd2csv Pretty simple code, does most of the work in-memory, and multiple regex passes to transform and clean up the CSV.