Considering the economy, the hard drive manufacturing issues in Thailand, etc. Yeah, this is pretty awesome. Gonna have a big tax bill. And yes, I am gonna grumble that the money would be better spent on ~3 new employees who would generate real economic activity, rather than sending it to the government to waste. Such is life. I don’t want to prognosticate for the year, just yet. But the trajectory we are on is making last year (our 3rd record year in a row), look … mild.

I’ve been readying a UPS ripping post (not the function, but the company). May backburner that for now. But been really REALLY busy. This is very good, in all aspects. Have lots of opportunities, many quotes out, some telegraphed orders (we know they are coming, we’ve been told, working its way through the systems), … this is turning out to be a very good year, and its only 2-Feb. Hoping I have time to actually write that longer business model post.

БогородицаArticle here. Its interesting that they make very similar points to what I’ve suggested in the past. Even more to the point, they bring up the very real specter of Lysenkoism rearing its ugly head … but now we can call it AGW-ism or CO2-ism. If you dare disagree with those in power, you will be fired and shunned. Lack of evidentiary support be damned, full speed ahead. Lysenko set back Soviet era biology by decades.

Иконописwe give a quote to someone, they see a part number, find a vendor who is selling this at some enhanced discount for any number of reasons, and then ask us to match it. I am guessing that they don’t realize we actually compare our costs to various measures, and make sure our pricing is not out of whack (sometimes our suppliers just can’t seem to give us the same deals they give others, go figure).

I guess this gets Qlogic out of the IB arena. Good catch by Rich at InsideHPC I had spoken to a number of folks at Intel over the years w.r.t. IB, and they said they were keeping their options open. IB riser boards are available for some of their MB’s, and from what I have seen, Intel has a renewed push into the MB space. Not sure about the server space in general, they’ve always had that and I think they will keep doing this (at least as a reference design basis).

A long time ago, in a galaxy far … far … away … I’ve been playing with primes for a while … computing them, etc. Have a neat way to represent any natural number (exluding 0) in terms of the exponents of their prime factors. Lots of reasons for playing with this. Started doing this before joining SGI … many moons ago, and used it as a way to entertain myself on airplanes when the laptop battery ran out.

… just received a note indicating that our Gluster Reseller contract was voided, and that we would be seeing a new partner portal for Red Hat Storage coming soon where we could apply again for reseller status. Hmmm …. Reading over the information I saw on the Red Hat storage platform, it looks like they are going full on appliance route, which diminishes the value we can potentially add to the platform, and removes much of the differentiation we can do at the stack level (better kernels, up to date drivers, tweaked/tuned drivers/OS, …).

Saw this linked from /.. UEFI boot is to be replacing the old BIOS boot. There are positives about this and negatives. New software is always buggy, and UEFI won’t magically become bug free. UEFI has security controls for signed OS booting (ostensibly to protect users). But the abuse of security systems to exclude competitive/alternative booting … yeah … maybe not such a good idea. It looks like Microsoft is trying to demand that its hardware ARM partners not enable anything but Windows 8 or an equivalent signed OS (is Android signed?

Had to get a Led Zeppelin reference in at least once a year on the blog … Pathology report came back. Ok, in the movie series The Matrix, there is a set of scenes where the story tellers want you to believe that the character (Neo in the clip below’s case) was moving with “super-human” speed, and able to move an accelerate a very large mass (their body) faster than a very tiny mass (the bullet).

Its 2-January-2012, and assuming the Mayans' were wrong (ok technically I’ve not heard of any suggestion they did anything more than stop their calendar on a convenient-for-them boundary), an interesting question is, what has happened to the company-formerly-known-as-Sun’s HPC assets? Lustre is one of the most well known, and it now has some type of future ahead of it. I’ll talk about that in a later post. This future was most definitely not assured 1 year ago, and there was considerable uncertainty in its longevity as Oracle had, about a year ago, let go most of the developers.