We’ve noticed this over the past week. Have a number of new orders, and suddenly, memory is hard to find. And prices have jumped dramatically. From /. We do just-in-time builds, we tend to keep inventory down. Global supply and demand folks, the economy is operating as it should. When you have shortages, pricing rises through channel to market. There is little we can do about this. We have some memory supply (the parts giving us issues now), and CPUs aren’t a problem.

on my desk. Quick thinking Doug managed to help me avoid a tragedy of epic proportions (completely covering my desk with coffee) by application of the caffeine leak containment device (e.g. towel). No pictures of this tragedy, and it was unrelated to any earthquakes. It was related to the klutz whose left hand was near the coffee and moved it like this … DO’H!

This is close to 1/2 PB. Assume you are building a very fast storage unit and backup system. What should this cost? Yeah, we can argue about cost per GB/s and cost per IOP/s. Assume 3GB/s, and 10k IOPs. Assume the unit is 144TB raw (108TB usable) primary fast storage, and 288TB raw (216TB usable) storage. There is a poll for this post, but you have to click the title to be able to participate.

See InsideHPC for the scoop. PRWeb stuff here. Will have it up on our site soon. This uses the XCT chassis, which lets us use C20x0 Fermi, as well as other PCIe cards (can you say Virident Flash? ) The system will be using Bright Computing’s excellent Cluster Management tool. We will take pictures/movies during assembly and installation. Should be fun! About 15TF, 100x Fermi units, 96TB storage. Excellent design overall (pats himself on the back), and a major win for our partner JRTI and us, validating our strategic partnership.

The earthquake, tsunami and its after effects are terrible enough. Our thoughts are with the people of Japan (we have quite a few readers there). The US Red Cross has setup to take donations for relief work there if you are inclined to go that route. If you are in Japan, and have alternative suggestions as to how we all can help, please do post them. One of the after effects of this event was a destabilization of a boiling water reactor.

Testing this for a partner. A Pegasus deskside supercomputer with 12x X5690 CPU cores, 48 GB RAM, 500 MB/s IO channel (soon to 1 GB/s), and a GTX 260 graphics card. Connected to an XCT a-Brix 2U unit with 4x NVidia Fermi C2050’s (normally we’d use a JackRabbit unit, but they are all busy with customer projects right now). First, lets see whats there: [root@pegasus C]# lspci | grep nVidia | grep VGA 06:00.

[updated] Ok, this one is huge. Many of the higher end storage folks in the HPC world use this hardware. Which NetApp will now own. NetApp is not an HPC storage vendor, and I don’t think they have designs to be one [update] yes they do! But this goes to Cray, SGI, Oracle, Dell, IBM, HP, and many others (DDN, Bluearc, Terascala, etc.) who do use Engenio. We don’t use it, so its really not an issue to us.

Parts fail. Components fail. You have to operate assuming they will fail. A warranty is fundamentally a bet that parts will fail, and a willingness to place money (the price of the warranty) on that bet. Over time, with enough components, you get a feel for how often parts fail. You get historical data. When one subset of components have a high failure rate (e.g. Corsair SSD disks), you know you can isolate the problem.

A customer was playing with one of our lab machines (a JackRabbit JR5), and asked us if we could improve the multithread streaming performance. The way we had it set up (for internal testing) was non-optimal for their use case. So we went back and did some simple tweaks. Somewhat better optimized for their use case. Remember, this is our previous generation unit. Next gen is … a little faster :)

Hitachi, whose drives we do like, was just eaten by WD, whose drives we run away from. Story here. As long as the product lines that get ditched are the WD’s in favor of the Hitachi’s, I am ok with this. 2TB drives that decide to randomly power down in a RAID, without informing anyone? And a company that seems to want us all to believe that there are no firmware updates?