I just spent too long tearing my (altogether far too few remaining) hair(s) out over a driver issue. Qlogic 7240 IB card. Decent DDR unit. Our 2.6.32.22 kernel. Very stable kernel. Rock solid under ridiculous load. OFED 1.5.2 with all the nice bug fixes etc. And inserting/removing qib would cause all manner of kernel hiccups. So much for stability. Well, that is, as long as the ib_ipath.ko, from the kernel RPM, was in there.

Customer: Must be something wrong with your gear, because we know what we are doing. Me: Er … (noting that something that was working correctly before they touched it, is no longer working) … ok … so what changes have you made? Customer: Changes? We haven’t changed anything! Me: Er … but it was working, then it stopped working. So what changed? Customer: We just altered the network Me: Ok, now we are onto something (and likely the reason why the “equipment is broken") Customer: But we didn’t break it … Me: Yes, I understand.

I’ve been monitoring the IP addresses and logs on the poll voting. You can vote for more than one item, select several, hit vote, and it generates a cookie so that you won’t be able to vote again. That is, unless you take the explicit step of clearing this cookie. And voting again. What this is telling me is that people feel a need not to simply report their (possibly multiple) preferences … but instead to actively game an informal measurement system.

See here. Larry Page (U of Mich alum … woot!*) More power to Larry (and all the other co-founders out there with vision and a desire to get the job done). Don’t forget to grow some data center bits here … its really cold right now … no need to spend on cooling for like 6 months out of the year! (not to mention, we have some nice servers we can customize for you!

We’ve been busy. Real busy. Did I mention we’ve been busy? Once the website rolls, please, by all means, let us know if somethings broke. Email works. Hopefully we won’t melt the server … [Update] Doug rocks. In case I didn’t mention it. He rocks! Sites up with minor breakage (modulo grammar, inconsistent numbers … ) May need a site breakage bounty. Gonna think about this ….

Will be up on the day job site tomorrow. We are very excited by these developments, and look forward to a productive relationship JRTI and Scalable Informatics Form Strategic Partnership to Provide High Performance Storage and CPU & GPU Clusters to Organizations Seeking Exceptional Results Richmond, Virginia (January 18, 2011)-James River Technical, Inc (JRTI), specialists in accelerated and HPC solutions for the higher education, research, government, and commercial market segments, has entered into a reseller agreement with Scalable Informatics (Scalable) to provide Storage and HPC solutions throughout North America.

Univa grabs GridEngine. Specifically: Hat tip to Chris D for pointing it out. This directly addresses one of my major concerns on the longevity of GE. It also makes me feel a bit safer about using/deploying GE for users/customers. Specifically, if a committed and large/stable enough OSS project and/or committed company were to drive this, engage and work with the community to grow it, yeah … I am comfortable with this.

Saw this on /. Paraphrasing Shakespeare, a fork by any other name … Look … I appreciate that no one wants to call this a fork. Oracle has seemingly abandoned the project and is shopping ownership of the IP around. The choices ahead of the community are find someone to buy the IP, and rally to their leadership, ignore the IP, rename the project and fork it. You could always pretend that the IP isn’t an issue, that no fork is needed, and then have to do some serious rhetorical contortions to explain why your release isn’t a fork.

See here on LinkedIn. In case you can’t see it, the premise of the question is “Would you buy storage based on Lustre”, and it specifically points to Rich B’s article at InsideHPC. Choices are Yes, still Lustre No, I’d choose Panasas No, I’d choose GPFS No, I’d choose Gluster No, another solution Its a small, self selecting, and probably badly biased sample, but whats interesting is that about 20% each seem like they would choose Lustre, Panasas, or another solution and about 40% would choose GPFS, with no one choosing Gluster.

I could pat my own back on this … no really, I could. Wouldn’t be hard. I’ve been talking for a long time about how the HPC market will likely evolve. Hidden within this is how to grow as a business … serving this need. We’ve been predicting that the cloud HPC model will reduce the number of new clusters deployed. Basically, acquisition costs for running a cluster are large, as well as the lifetime costs.