Archive for the 'Work' Category

The cost of supercomputing

Published on November 12, 2010 in Geek, Rants and Work. Closed

So this upcoming week is the big annual supercomputing convention, SC10, down in New Orleans. Since I’m skipping out (anxiously waiting for the arrival of Little Miss Sunshine), I’ve got time to actually try and read through the slew of new product announcements and news coverage. So today I saw this quote on twitter from hpc_guru and just had to share:

“Cost of the building next generation of supercomputers is not the problem. The cost of running the machines is what concerns engineers.”

That’s one thing that sometimes frustrates me when it comes to working with academics who want to get their own HPC system. For example, you may be looking at an annual facilities cost that’s say 10-20% of the original purchase cost of the system. It’s usually a whole lot easier to get funding from the fed or elsewhere for a 1 time big purchase than it is to get them to provide you with an annual budget for operational expenses. I’ve certainly heard horror stories of folks that went out and got a grant to buy a cluster and only talked to the university computing folks after it arrived to find out there weren’t enough data center resources (floor space, power, cooling) available to unbox the thing and turn it on. Then you end up in situations where they unbox a small handful of rackmount compute nodes and stuff one under each grad student’s desk in order to get something out of it. Not quite the cluster they were hoping for, but that’s arguably better than going back to the grant agency after a few years to tell them you haven’t published anything with the system you bought since you didn’t think to make sure there was a place to put it before you pursued the grant.

A more frequent pet peeve of mine is the end users that don’t understand why HPC storage doesn’t cost the same per TB as they can get from Best Buy. “But I just saw in their ad last week that I can get a 2TB drive for $100. You should give me way more storage on your HPC system than you do because it’s so cheap.” Right. Who cares about performance or scalability or reliability and BER. Certainly not them until they start complaining that the system is slow or demand to know why their data went poof.

Rackable acquires SGI?

Published on April 1, 2009 in Geek and Work. Closed

Well this is certainly not something I expected. SGI is one of the few HPC vendors out there that I’m aware of who are still doing neat things with hardware. We’ve got some of their large SMP Itanium boxes on the floor where I work, and I think they’re pretty slick machines. Pricy, but slick. And so far their support is about the best I’ve dealt with. That’s not saying their perfect (try getting a CXFS guru on the phone when you need one without sitting on a major outage for several hours), but they generally seem better than most of the other HPC vendors I’ve worked with (IBM, Cray). But SGI’s certainly had its share of financial woes and I think there was a recent warning from NASDAC that they’d be delisted. So I’m not necessarily surprised that someone’s buying them out, but that it’s Rackable specifically.

I’ve never had real day-to-day experience with a Rackable system, but they seemed to work at the other extreme of value commodity systems. I’ve chatted with some of their sales/technical folks and they push their cluster in a cargo container idea pretty hard. Their distinguishing features seem to be power distribution (aiming at higher efficiency by doing a single AC -> DC conversion and distributing DC to all the servers in a rack), and cooling efficiency (half depth servers loaded from both sides of a rack and blasting hot air into the gab between them in the middle of the rack). These are certainly aimed at addressing some of the big issues in datacenters everyone’s facing (power & cooling), but a lot of the big vendors are attacking those same problems, so I couldn’t guess whether Rackable really stands out in the commodity cluster space. But I suppose if they’ve got VC cash lying around, buying up the engineering assets at SGI may go a long ways toward giving them some more unusual products to set them apart.

I have to admit there’s a small part of me that thinks today was not the best day for them to announce the acquisition given the history of April 1st online shenanigans everyone’s expecting.

[Press release]

Research in Alabama – scorpions fight cancer at UAB

Published on April 10, 2008 in Work. Closed Tags: , , .

Medical researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) have discovered a new use for scorpion venom — cancer medication. Each year, some 9,000 Americans are diagnosed with malignant glioma, a form of brain cancer that kills about half its victims within a year of diagnosis.

Glioma cells work a lot like cockroach muscle cells. And while that fact is pretty disgusting, it also got UAB researchers thinking about the giant Israeli scorpion, whose venom is harmless to humans but deadly to its cockroach prey.

Doctors found that when they injected a drug derived from the venom of giant Israeli scorpions into cancer-infected human brains, the poison destroyed the glioma cells and left surrounding, healthy cells alone. The treatment is still in the early stages of development, but researchers remain optimistic.

See the rest of the article on deadly animals that might save your life at Mental Floss.

Savannah

Published on March 19, 2008 in Photography and Work. Closed Tags: , , , , , .

Took a trip for work back in December to provide cluster training for some of the engineers at Gulfstream. Seems like we also did some very minor maintenance on the cluster we administer there. Anyway, I brought the camera along and had a chance to take a few pics while wandering around the riverfront. Only got around to pulling them off my camera today, so here they are:



Life in Alabama

Published on August 25, 2007 in General and Work. Closed

We’ve been here in Alabama for 2 weeks now. Things seem to be going pretty well so far. We somehow survived the move and I don’t think left anything too critical behind. The truck full of half our stuff (and pulling the Civic), the CRV full of cats and guitars, and all the occupants got down here safely and relatively uneventfully. The POD full of the other half of our stuff arrived this past Thursday and we’re slowly working on unloading it. Moving in and unloading the POD has been a little slow since it’s been 100+ just about the whole time we’ve been here. For an idea of just how hot it is, the TVA shut down one of the nuclear plants near here due to the heat/drought and apparently that’s a first for the US (article). Otherwise, things around the house have been slowly progressing:

  • All utilities are set up, but we’re still waiting on a replacement garbage can and a recycle bin
  • Got bundled cable internet, digital cable tv + HBO + DVR, and phone service
    • (dvr was a free screwup on their part)
  • Ordered and received a new fridge, washer, and dryer
    • (seems the outlet for the dryer probably wasn’t wired up right, so an electrician is coming on Monday to check it out)
  • Already made use of the home warranty to get the downstairs AC fixed this past week after the fan motor quit
  • Amanda put up curtains in most of the windows and has them ordered for the remaining windows
  • Amanda has started the complex task of planning and installing shelving, hanging rods, etc in the closets
    • Did I mention not a single closet had any of this when we moved in?
    • Did I also mention most of the closets are REALLY WEIRD shapes? I’ll have to remember to scan the floorplan Amanda drew up for the master closet and post it…

I’m enjoying the new job, and they’re definitely keeping me busy. Seems like I’ve gone pretty quickly from manual lackey (help load these new drive trays into the rack) to taking the lead on new projects (go figure out how to set up grid computing so we can jump jobs between the supercomputers here and the clusters down at UAB). I’ll probably go into more detail about what I’ve been up to at work, and what I will be getting up to in another post.

I think Amanda’s settling in to doing her old job at the new location. Things haven’t been entirely smooth, but she can finally get into the building without needing the secretary to buzz her in. Amazingly enough, her computer made it to the local office for her first day here, but they’ve still got some technical issues to iron out if they want her to actually be productive. Unsurprisingly, shuffling lots of data from Huntsville to Bloomington across the internet is 4-5x slower than moving it within their intranet in Bloomington. But at least she can access data in Bloomington and get work done, even if it isn’t efficient.

Since we didn’t have a fridge till this past Wednesday, we’ve been eating out a lot so we’ve had the chance to sample several local restaurants and have found a number of good places to eat. I’ve also picked up some Southern slang that I may have to document for everyone’s amusement. :)

As you may have noticed…

Published on July 25, 2007 in General and Work. Closed

Amanda and I are buying a new house. In a land far far from CU… Huntsville, AL to be exact… or technically Madison, AL to be even more exact (suburb to the west of Huntsville).

No, Derek didn’t graduate. While one could ask “why is he leaving sans-degree”, a better question might be “why is he referring to himself in the third person?” To put it simply, I just got fed up with how things have been going (or not going to be more precise) and decided it was time for a change. And what could be a bigger change for me than to get an actual job-type job and leave academia behind. I ended up taking a job at the Alabama Supercomputer Authority in Huntsville, which sounds like it should be a great place to work.

That time of year again… Ethics Training!

Published on October 25, 2005 in Work. Closed

What an unbelievable waste of time. Some state law passed last year (at least I assume last year… I started having to do this last year anyway) requires that all state employees must go through ethics training every year. Interesting how grad students are considered employees when it means additional requirements/constraints be placed on us and students when they’re talking about salary/benefits/parking/etc. Fortunately it’s done through the web instead of requiring us to attend an actual class. So you have to read (click) through a bunch of training crap, and only after you’ve clicked through it all will they give you access to the quiz. If I remember correctly, you need to answer all 10 questions correctly before they’ll consider you trained. Now I have a stupid HTML certificate that I can opt to print out and hang on my wall if I want to prove I’m certified ethical. What a crock.

Bad Computer Mojo

Published on October 25, 2005 in Geek and Work. Closed

I’ve been suffering from some bad computer mojo as of recent.

  1. First our group fileserver tanked. Not that I really came into physical contact with it, but I talked to it over the network all the time.
  2. Then my brand spankin’ new NAS drive (got a Buffalo LinkStation, basically an external hard drive enclosure with ethernet instead of USB/Firewire) had some sort of catastrophic firmware failure while I was using it and I was forced to RMA it. Fortunately they would do an advance RMA where they’d ship me a replacement, I’d put the busted one in that box and return it to them (with the assumption that they’ll charge my credit card if I fail to return the busted one within 2 weeks).
  3. Now, I’ve somehow managed to kill the USB/Firewire interface in my normal hard drive enclosure (the one I leave at work with my music so I have good tunes to listen to). The drive is ok (ie I put it in my desktop and my data was still there), and the enclosure will power up and spin up the drive, but the computer can’t see it when hooked up to either USB or Firewire. Guess I’m in the market for a new enclosure.

On a related note, one of the guys in another research group (who also happened to get wonked by our fileserver crash) pointed me at the following PhD Comics yesterday. Seems amazingly poignant right now.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

OTR architect joins the ECE department!

Published on October 14, 2005 in Geek and Work. Closed

I should really pay closer attention to who joins our department. Nikita Borisov apparently just started here this semester and is currently doing work on anonymous peer-to-peer networks. Nick introduced him to Jeff and I today with the intention of giving him some of our spare computers to get his group started.

Afterwards I took a look at his past work and realized he was one of the primary architects for Off-the-Record Messaging that I use in Gaim (Linux/Windows) and AdiumX (OSX). I actually previously mentioned this back when I saw the changelog for AdiumX 0.80. Pretty slick stuff. Provides encryption, authentication, deniability and perfect forward secrecy. All open-source and ties in nicely with the IM clients I was already using. Now if only I could find someone else to use it with me. :)

Regardless, Nikita should be an interesting addition to the department. I certainly look forward to seeing what he’s got to say at seminars and such.

You eeediot!

Published on October 11, 2005 in Rants and Work. Closed

What’s the deal with stupid people getting union secretary gigs in Universities? Don’t get me wrong, I’ve met some great and helpful secretaries in my time. But so many of them are just so useless! I’ve been dealing a bit with one in the business office for our department trying to place orders for my students in senior design. Here are my two experiences so far:

1. Took a couple of days to get my first order placed. Some of this lag (ie an hour or two) was me trying to figure out what all info they really needed on the form. Apparently they’ll order stuff off the web, but want you to write down the company’s address and phone number and such anyway (not like they could possibly look that up the same way I did on the company’s website). Get a call a while later saying there’s been some problems with the order. Drop by there to find out she’s leaving for the day at 12:30 (and it’s 12:15 and I’m in a hurry). For some reason that she wouldn’t explain she couldn’t order from the website I’d given her and had to order through a distributor. Not sure why she couldn’t order it… I gave her the web address that led directly to the product, and there’s an “add to cart” button prominently displayed on that page, but I’m figuring maybe she’s using a corporate card and they want her to go through a distributor or something. So she’s randomly selected Cabela’s outdoor goods and tried searching for the part I’m ordering and has the good sense to ask before submitting the order. It’s a good thing too since I’m trying to get an OEM GP S sensor and Cabela’s (being a consumer store) only carries the little handheld GPS units with lcd displays and so forth. I’ve got to go so I tell her I’ll find a distributor that carries it and place the order again the next day when she gets back into the office. Find 1 place in the US that carries it and they want $70 more for it than the manufacturer. So I figure I’ll press the issue the next day and ask why she can’t order it from the site I give her. I sort of watch what she’s doing and it’s clear she’s only entered the blah.com part of the address (instead of going directly to the link I’ve given her) and cluelessly tried to search around their site for the part in question. She apparently had better luck that day since she actually found it and confirmed it was the right thing and actually placed the order.

2. Second order hasn’t been much better so far. I’d grabbed another form on my way to meet with one of my groups. Filled out the info and tried to drop it off at the office. Turns out they’re out for the day by 4:30. Not really surprising I guess, but you’d figure a big office that has to have at least 5 or 6 secretaries might be open till the end of the business day. But there’s a drop box outside the door for purchase orders so I stupidly drop it in. Haven’t heard anything in the following few days so I assume there haven’t been any problems and I’ll be notified when it arrives. Go to double check the order’s been placed after meeting with a group yesterday to find out she has no idea what I’m talking about (not entirely true, she tries to tell me baout the order I’d placed 2 weeks earlier). I confirm that the drop box is where I should put orders when they’re closed and she says she’ll double check the box. Turns out they only do a cursory visual inspection of the box to see if it has anything and don’t actually bother to open it unless it is overflowing with orders (only way I can see that they’d notice there was anything in there without actually checking). Sure enough my order was still sitting in there from when I dropped it off 5 days earlier. In theory the order’s been placed… now.

3. Guess we’ll wait and see. Don’t have high hopes that my third encounter with this woman will go any better than the last two. I can understand having an off day, but it seems to be the only kind she has.