This was nice. The original movie in the series was shot downtown Detroit. Or at least the scenes towards the end (when they are duking it out in the city). It was funny to see the old railroad terminal building being used as a chase scene. FWIW, that building would make one helluva nice data center. Just needs to be cleaned up, with lots of AC/power added. Right next to a rail-road right of way.

Just found out the day job lost a major storage upgrade to a competitor. Read over the evaluations, and we had some questions, sent them off to the purchasing folks. Its always annoying to lose. But from losing you can gain knowledge of why you lost and hone your offerings or your bidding … well … most of the time you can. Sometimes, the process is engineered for a particular outcome, due to an effective manipulation of rankings.

Somewhat better tuning on this unit now. This is getting … interesting. Very interesting. As a reminder, the day job’s lower cost storage target, the DeltaV is designed specifically to be a lower end machine. It is fast, and as we saw on the last set of numbers, it is actually faster than competitors hardware RAID. DeltaV does the RAID bits in software. So this is another (identical) unit to the one we tested before.

As the discussion of the amazing performance of the K machine continues, one needs to ask how well correlated the numbers are against end user realizable and likely performance. That is, how useful is top500 as an actual predictor of system performance for a particular task? Same question of Graph500, SPEC*, etc. ? How useful is Green500 at predicting power utilization and likely throughput of a specific design? Basically, I am not trying to minimize the efforts put into these.

This is a personal bit. I am going up for belt promotion in Karate this Thursday. Huge risk saying something in advance in case I don’t make it. I am not worried about most of it. The fighting portion, yeah, a bit. I’m fine in sparring bouts, but this promises to be at least 7 fresh opponents, one after the other, with no rest for me. 2 minutes each opponent, and they run them from low to higher rank (the opponents get tougher at the end).

Not much. No, I am not trying to be a downer. The relation of the top500 top-o-the-heap to mere mortals with hard problems to solve isn’t very strong. Actually its quite weak. There is only one K machine. Its at RIKEN in Japan. There’s only one Jaguar, and only one Tihane machine. All are, to some degree or the other, unique in some aspects. What matters to most people is “what can it do for me”?

Should be a pretty good performance bump for the unit. Processor and memory bump. Newer backplane. Some other bits. Will update soon. Really looking forward to the benchies :) [Update 1] Very encouraging sign: RAID build is occurring at about 2x the rate of the previous generation. Should be done with 48TB RAID build in about 7 more hours. The comparison to the hardware accelerated RAID should be made as well.

Pathscale makes some of the best C/C++/Fortran compilers on the market. And now, they are open source. Grab the bits while they are hot!

Them: Here is our parts list. We found it by going to these web sites (see long list) finding the lowest cost among them, and then adding it in to the spec. Me: Uh huh (noting the several conflicting and wrong elements). So what is it you are trying to do … Them: Never mind that, this is our new machine, and it will do X … [n.b. X is some magical realization of performance at the 99th percentile of the systems capability … only would hit that if everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, was perfect.

FusionIO goes public tomorrow. If you are an early employee, chances are, you are going to be a millionaire by the end of the day, at least on paper. The author of the great “fio” tool works there, and I hope this does work out for him and the rest of them well. But … my question is a longer term one. Does the market … or will the market … support a higher cost PCIe channel flash as opposed to lower cost SSD based units?