This is really starting to worry me. I see site after site running similar sets of programs against SSDs, generating the same numbers, within error bars. The problem is that the numbers they generate are meaningless due to several measurement flaws. First: Sandforce controllers compress data. Which means that some data (say simple repeating patterns of, oh, I dunno, zeros?) will compress really well, and show bandwidths far higher than real use cases will measure.

Steve Jobs, a young man of 56, passed away this evening. While not so much in traditional HPC, Apple profoundly changed the way we work with … no … the way we use, and think about using computing technology. He is credited with the vision, though Apple has had and does have many very smart people working there. My condolences to his immediate family, and his extended family. Today, we bought our first Mac book Air.

Readers of this blog will know I’ve been saying this publicly for a while (and no, I had no inside knowledge of this, no knowledge of it whatsoever, no one spoke to me, and I own no shares of any of these companies). Redhat acquiring Gluster is a good thing. While AB, Hitesh, and the team have done a bang up job getting the product out, and doing interesting things with it, they needed additional capital resources to take it to the next level.

See their link. They seem to have nicely allowed for write-ins, which makes voting better :) We don’t do much in manufacturing, so there’s little point to this for us. In HPC for life sciences, Scalable Informatics JackRabbit is in use at a number of sites as a very high performance storage unit. We don’t do much in automotive either. We do lots in financial services; with our Scalable Informatics JackRabbit being the best in breed performance for spinning rust systems, and from my understanding, causing some of our friends with pure PCIe Flash or SSD to say WTH!

As mentioned earlier, we’ve had a consistent problem with a few customers who wish to ignore their bills. They’d like to pretend we have no interest in getting paid, so they don’t pay. This is part of the reason why we’ve stopped acting like a bank. We aren’t very good at it, and its not our core competency. You want credit, go to a bank. You want the fastest (in terms of measured speed, not theoretical guesses) storage you can get, we can help.

“Is this the right person for the job”? I pointed out that the direction itself was probably not that well thought out, and the concept … dropping 1/3 of your revenue base, when you are atop the market in terms of installed base and run rate, probably wasn’t an idea that really should have been given serious credence. HP’s board is now, belatedly, asking … do we have the right person for the job?

and we hit the throttle … crack it open … lets see what this baby can do Looking at a sustained … well … I dunno … 1.2 million IOPs? Occasional bursts to 2.4M IOPs? At very nearly 10 GB/s? What does fio say? read : io=524416MB, bw=9339.6MB/s, iops=1195.5K, runt= 56150msec and Run status group 0 (all jobs): READ: io=524416MB, aggrb=9339.6MB/s, minb=9563.8MB/s, maxb=9563.8MB/s, mint=56150msec, maxt=56150msec Nice! You may see something like this at SC11.

Sometimes you know what your friends and acquaintances are up to … and sometimes you see them in adverts for Google search … Here’s the advert: Its semi-OT as the person, Dave Strenski, is also an HPC hand of quite a stretch at Cray, and has been a colleague of mine during our SGI/Cray days. He was one of the reasons I thought Cray had some of simply the best technical people anywhere.

иконопис(BTW: still in London, then off to Stockholm, then home) A customer just saw this with RHEL 6. Windows performance was higher than Linux performance on the same machine. The customer didn’t understand it, we guessed at first about it, and in the end our initial guess was wrong. But we caught what was wrong, with a WAG, and it troubled me. So I wrote this. First clue as to the nature of the problem came from numastat.

… 4TB drives. Imagine, a nice 192TB in a single unit, coupled to a 5GB/s data movement engine. Coming soon … :)иконописikoni