… on Monday … Woo Hoo!!! What hasn’t killed us, has made us stronger … Or something like that. More correctly, the company was born 1-August-2002. Growing since inception. About to grow some more. No venture backing. During this time, we’ve worked on trying to convince people that accelerators would be important to HPC, back in 2004 time frame or so. Tried to raise capital, built business plans, got most of the details right.

Design is good, but it looks like we are rate limited on the PCIe gen 2. 128GB read from a single name space. 8 simultaneous threads. Run status group 0 (all jobs): READ: io=126984MB, aggrb=5285.8MB/s, minb=5412.6MB/s, maxb=5412.6MB/s, mint=24024msec, maxt=24024msec Yes, that is 5.3 GB/s. Still far south of what we can be doing, but I’ve verified that we are rate limited to ~2GB/s per RAID with other tests. This looks like a card issue.

икониBenchies soon. Real soon. Should be a screamer … if we designed/built it right.

Many things are moving to cloud hosting … I won’t comment on being right or wrong about their moving … and HPC is one of them. This means that cluster distributions are going to follow … or could follow to some degree. Some cluster distributions focus upon packaging, some focus upon flexibility, some focus upon GUIs. All try to integrate some subset of needed tools. But all were effectively designed for a cluster computing model where some of the key/critical assumptions at the base of the distribution are simply not the case in the cloud, and due to the way they work, can’t easily be worked around.

None of them bad. Too much work to get through (yes, that does mean new/existing orders). A vacation (long overdue, and yes, I was working though it as well). Back now … will be catching up soon with a set of posts in the next few days.

Every now and then recruiters call me. Want to see if I want the glamour of some new position somewhere. I run a very nice little, and growing company. I own a substantial fraction of this company. Our revenues are far more than the recruiter’s company is likely willing to pay. There are too many digits in our revenues, before the decimal point, relative to any likely salary. I am working extremely hard at increasing the number of digits.

Detroit Edison worked on it and got our office power up in 24 hours. Our house (where this server is located) … not so happy. Didn’t come back on until afternoon today. That was fun. [update] … and all the updating I’ve done has managed to bork the views counter. So its gonna look like we don’t get lots of traffic here. Will see if I can reconstruct this, but its a low priority item .

Working on solving an issue for a customer. Wrote a backing store scanning tool for the job. Its gathering all manner of information and computing md5 sums. Right now it is single threaded, and as I am watching it run, it seems like I am using about 1/2 of the IO bandwidth (2 scans going at once on a machine). Will look at getting the scans going in parallel. Shouldn’t be hard (embarrassingly parallel problem).

We’ve been working on some things, quietly, for a while. Almost … almost ready to talk about this. Should have something to show at SC11 this year certainly. Working on tuning. Maybe a character flaw on my part, but I am never happy with performance. More soon. I promise … (and yeah, been insanely busy, again).

Using a tar pair to move data between two systems, over an NFS link. This is faster than over ssh (ssh isn’t a fast transport layer). Some user wrote a sparse file out. An 11PB sparse file. Which the tar happily … happily I tell you !!! was trying to copy, in its entirety, over to the backup unit. Happily. Took me a quick look to see what was going on.