Not that cnbc is the bastion of correct/reliable/accurate reporting, but this article definitely hurts. The “American dream” has been to own your own house. We bought ours 13 years ago, with a 30 year mortgage. Refinanced 6 years ago to a 20 year mortgage, with the same payments. We assumed the value of the house would be increasing or at worst, staying the same. Last I checked on a few real estate sites, we are “underwater or upside-down” on the mortgage.

This is going to sound like a strange question to ask. Yes … I know it is a strange question to ask given the events of the past few months. A long while ago, I postulated that Lustre’s future was (no pun intended) cloudy at best. That Sun/Oracle had an uncertain level of commitment to it, and Larry Ellison is a business man, and doesn’t run a charity … there aren’t any freebees he is likely to fund forever.

A partner was working with us on an opportunity. At some point in the process, the customer tripped my alarms. This was going well into 2x4 material (e.g. our proposal wasn’t going to be seriously considered). I shared my thoughts with the partner. They wanted to press ahead. Sure enough, we got word of our 2x4-ness today. Nice to know we helped a customer beat a competitor up. Well, no, not really.

from the $day job. Stay tuned.

[root@jr5-lab ~]# fio sw.fio Run status group 0 (all jobs): WRITE: io=19,200GB, aggrb=2,323MB/s, minb=2,379MB/s, maxb=2,379MB/s, mint=8463222msec, maxt=8463222msec Thats 8463.2 seconds to you and me. 2.351 hours. 8.17TB/hour And we didn’t even fill the unit up. This is what we mean by a low bandwidth wall. You can conceivably read/write the entire storage in a time comparable to single hours. If your platform can’t handle this (and most can’t), then you have a very high wall erected between you and your data.

I’ve seen some clustered file system results a few months ago where the vendor was happy to sustain something like 1.4 GB/s during their IO operations, and called this good. Something like 60 disks. Lustre, and some other bits. Their approach (and most people’s approach) in this space is to start with a bunch of demonstratably slow servers/disks, and aggregate them. Which eventually gets you to the performance you are looking for, albeit with low performance density, large expenditure of capital, large investment in space/power/cooling.

I had expected NVidia to do something. AMD and Fusion. Intel with AVX(Larabee, et al.) and integrated video. NVidia had to either develop its own processor, buy a design/company, or fight a battle in the future it would likely lose … not due to the quality of the competitors or their parts, but simply because the deck was stacked against it. Their direction is interesting. Going ARM and a fusion like thing as a CPU + GPU (though I doubt they will call it an APU … they are all about the APU … where A==G).

We don’t like being used as a 2x4 (two-by-four) … basically a heavy chunk of wood used to beat someone into submission. Some of the surest signs of 2x4-dom are when we are asked for an onsite loaner. The theory behind this is supposed to be that a customer will evaluate a unit in their environment, give it a rigorous going over, and then make a purchase decision based upon that.

Ahh … grub. That boot loader. The one that … after interacting with … you wish you didn’t have to. Just had some fun a few minutes ago on a Lustre upgrade. Some of the grub tools are slightly broken, many are horribly, irretrievably borked. And they will do bad things to you. To your disk. Paraphrasing Churchill, grub is the worst bootloader, except for all the rest. I’ll argue that its marginally better than lilo.

Some near term … some far term. Pragmatic projects: Dust. Almost to the point where I am happy releasing it. Will have ~6 driver packs, a spec, a user tool, and a roadmap when I am done. Think of it as a DKMS that works, and what it could have been. Lustre. We have operational Lustre builds from the git tree, though these are 2.x builds, and not 1.8.x builds.