(this was actually a while ago, just getting to publishing it now). Friday, I drove up to a local University to drop off our bid. I sent a note beforehand to let them know I might be a few minutes late, there was construction. Sure enough, got caught in a 30 minute slowdown. I was 13 minutes late. They said, “hey thats great. We won’t look at it” Then on the way back, the old landlord refused to acknowledge that we were tenants, so they refused to refund our deposit.

No, not Meatloaf lyrics. A few years ago, I guessed that the HPC market was going to bifurcate or possibly trifurcate. Well, its about 3 years on, and bifurcate it did. Accelerators (in the form of GPUs) are everywhere. I was dead on correct in almost every aspect of what I had predicted (privately to VCs, from whom we couldn’t raise a cent in the early/mid 2000’s for this market). Remote cluster/clouds with dropping prices per CPU hour are taking over sections of HPC, and we see some impact upon purchase decisions made by people buying clusters.

Seems I’m not alone in the world wanting to parse apache log files. I googled lots of people bitterly complaining about it. Some folks wanted to write a grammar, and a flex/yacc/bison thingy. I am sure that there are some Java programmers who’ve been working on this … oh … 6 or 7 years or so, and may be approaching a solution, with a Java byte code only slightly below 1 PB in size.

Way back in my early days at web programming stuff, I started out with HTML::Mason as a templating engine. There is nothing wrong with Mason, its actually quite good. But it encourages the same sort of “code-in-page” designs that the entire language of PHP was built around. I’m mostly a Perl guy for application level stuff these days … have done my time with Fortran, Python, x86 assembly, C/C++, and many others.

Turns out Comcast doesn’t follow through (even when you call them many times to try to get them to). Thanks #Comcast . On Thursday, I bought a Mifi (pay as you go) from Verizon. Got it into the office. Had moved the web/mail stuff to Amazon EC2 “just in case” Comcast pulled a … well … Comcast. Yeah, took me a little while to fix the email and web side. We’ve been using our router appliance as our SOA for dns, and I had to unplug it at the old site (got everything out before 5pm Friday).

This happens often. We get a call from a user whose seen my postings in the Gluster or other lists. They’ve set up a storage system, and the performance is terrible. Is there anything that can be done about this? We dig into this, and find out that the people bought hardware, usually fairly low end/cheap brand name (e.g. tier 1) nodes, with limited disk options, and are running 1 disk for OS, and have another single larger SATA or SAS disk for storage.

One of our guys has left the organization. This is always hard. He is a good person, I like him a great deal. But I understand that sometimes there isn’t as good a fit as we might like there to be. If you happen to know a great HPC organization that needs an awesome senior sales dude, please email at the day job (landman At ScalableInformatics.com), and I’ll pass the contact along to him.

… movers pick up the old office bits tomorrow, and bring it to the new office. Have some (re)construction to do, some racks to stand up, an AC unit to hook up … and then the important things (which I learnt from my friends and customers in the UK) … a refrigerator and good cappuccino machine to buy …

Ever had an OMFG moment? Ever wish you could share it? In time, in time.

A: I updated the OS. Bad … bad Joe. Very bad. Don’t do that. Baaaaaaad Joe. … and now I get to fix the email, and the file server portion … and … Thank gosh for my … er … paranoid backing up of useful things. Pack-rat-ism is not a disease … its a quality … a feature.