took all my contact data with it … so … if you happen to want me to contact you, gotta give me some numbers to reach you at. Private email me at joe@scalability.org and I’ll re-enter it (and store it somewhere else). Yeah, mobile device backup? Pretty darned important? Me? A fool for not doing this regularly.

Day job storage unit has increased density. JackRabbit JR2 tops out at 36TB now, JackRabbit JR3 tops out at 48TB, JackRabbit JR4 tops out at 72TB, and JackRabbit JR4 tops out at 144TB. 8 of the latter can go into a 42U rack, and get you 1.1PB of insanely fast storage. Our measured bandwidths are also quite good. JR4’s are demonstrating sustained 2+GB/s. JR5’s … well :) DeltaV units of similar size specs.

A long while ago, I had developed a usage summary tool for gridengine. For our small internal cluster, we are using Torque (we set it up just as thedejecta was hitting the high rotational rate elements w.r.t. gridengine at Oracle, link URL may not be safe for work, and you might be offended by it … if so, I apologize.). This summary tool was a quick way to parse the accounting records.

Rocks, as folks might know is a cluster distribution based upon Redhat/Centos. This brings in all sort of issues on its own, but Rocks attempts to work around this and knead the distribution and associated tools into a cogent form, for simple cluster setup. The core team consisted of the project lead, several developers and a number of others directly or loosely affiliated with the group. Two members, Dr. Greg Bruno, and Mason Katz, just left to join Clustercorp, who make the commercial version, Rocks+.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. My former employer (left on good terms, between layoffs a decade ago next month) SGI has layoffs coming. This is a tough environment folks, a very tough environment. We pulled out a nearly 12% revenue growth in it. SGI posted a profit, but if you click through to the underlying article (hit InsideHPC first though), you see some interesting analysis. First on the size of the layoff.

This is goodness. Really. Peter Jones just sent out an email to the Lustre Discuss list, and it covers much of what i was hoping to see. Process ownership, agreement around the release for 2.1, central tracker, and build info. Yeah, its probably not the optimal outcome, but its a better place than we were a week or more ago. And that was still better than a month or two ago.

One of our competitors, having been recently purchased by a very large storage company, seems to be telling some customers that they replaced an infrastructure that we sold to to a large supercomputer center in the northern midwest. Curious, I hadn’t heard of this. Last I checked (a few minutes ago), the infrastructure was still in use. Moreover, they said “they” replaced GlusterFS on the system. Again … curious, as I don’t quite remember them on the con-calls.

I’ve mentioned in the past, where users expectations deviated, often wildly, from the reality of a system. The reason for these deviations of expectations could be internal (convincing yourself that “instant” means, literally, “instant”), external (believing marketing blurbs), or some factor between the two. At HPCinthecloud, an article on a user running head first into the reality of cloud computing, and avoiding the hype. Ok, a number of critical take-aways. One is that end user expectations can be wildly … badly … out of sync with reality.

Big HPC area. Yesterday, all the forecast models had us getting ~1.5 inches (about 4cm) of snow with rain/ice afterwords. We got (locally by me) 12+ inches (30+cm). Ok. I don’t mind if there are large error bars. Really I don’t. But this ? I don’t know enough about the models to be able to say anything terribly intelligent about their intrinsic accuracy, or if the omit anything, under/over predict anything … I do know enough to say that they weren’t in the same ballpark as what we got.

Looks similar to a number of others, but whats interesting is that it keeps its metadata in RAM. How much of an impact that provides for updates depends upon the efficiency of the network stack, and how much security it provides depends upon its ability to recover from unplanned outages … that is, it can’t just run in ram an occasionally update something on disk. Gotta look at this more though, as it could be interesting as a front end FS to something else on the backend.