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]

The Woz takes job at Fusion-io

Published on February 8, 2009 in Uncategorized. Closed Tags: , .

So this story has been all over the place (at least if you read computing/HPC news). Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer and designer of the historically significant Apple I and Apple II, took a job as chief scientist at a startup I was already aware of, Fusion-io. They’ve been designing PCIe boards loaded with flash memory to deliver super high performance storage to servers and maybe high-end gamers. In theory it’s using similar technology to SSDs, but they’re able to achieve significantly higher bandwidth and IOPs than has been achieved in an SSD that is focused on stuffing flash into a conventional SATA hard drive form factor. This isn’t the first time companies have tried using flash memory as a hard disk for HPC (Dave would remind me that one of the old Crays had a sea of flash memory intended for this purpose), but flash densities are finally getting high enough to put a useful amount of storage in a machine (as opposed to just using it to speed up your swap file/virtual memory).

What makes this particularly interesting to me is that John (buddy from UR and best man at my wedding) is chief hardware architect at Fusion-io. Hopefully this announcement, combined with their deals with some of the major manufacturers (Dell, HP, IBM) solidifies their company in the storage arena. I really think they have a cool product that sets them apart from everyone else trying to use flash memory in servers.

For more details, see the story at insideHPC.

Nashville Photos: Lane Motor Museum

Published on May 3, 2008 in Auto and Photography. Closed Tags: , , .

A couple of weeks ago, we went up to Nashville and hit a number of the sights. I’ll go ahead and split this into two posts, since I’ve only uploaded some of the relevant photos so far. The first day, we hit their recreation of the Parthenon. Apparently, it’s actually the second replica they’ve built, with the first being built in 1897 to celebrate their centennial but it was only built to last 6 months. The locals liked it so much, they elected to rebuild it in a more permanent manner. It now also hosts the city of Nashville’s art museum.

After that, we hit the Frist Center for the Visual Arts to catch their exhibit featuring Monet to Dali (on loan from the Cleveland Museum of Art). The other exhibit featured some of the work of Angelo Filomeno, who does really interesting (if a bit disturbing) embroidery work on large silk panels. From the Frist website, his works feature “embroidered images of fanged skulls, exploded peacocks, and hovering insects.” Strangely enough, that was about all they had. I have to admit we were a bit disappointed overall. We figured there’d be a more substantial art museum in a city the size of Nashville, but we arguably had a better time at the Huntsville art museum (especially given the difference in the price of admission).

Finally, we hit the Lane Motor Museum before heading home. By far the best stop of the day, especially since admission’s only $5 for an adult. I don’t know what Mr. Lane does for a living, but apparently he must do pretty well for him to have accumulated such an impressive selection of unusual autos predominantly from Europe and Japan. The collection includes everything from cars to trikes to motorcycles to a massive US Army LARC and other oddities like the Helicron. All sorts of cool stuff. Go check it out!

Cat Diary, Day 38,974 – Now where did I leave my dignity?

Published on April 24, 2008 in Cat Diary. 1 Comment Tags: .

My masters have hauled me down to this strange new land they keep referring to as The South. It seems like I’ve been hear for ages, which is apparently just long enough for them to inflict me with a bladder infection. I felt so uncomfortable I showed them who’s boss by peeing in things to anger them, and figured they’d break them any moment. Since they hadn’t made me better, I figured I had to be more blunt with these simpletons and started going to the litter box every fifteen minutes and I even stooped so low as to drag my ass on the carpet like a filthy dog.

Little did I know they would try and fight back by taking me to the evil man with his pointy stick that he’d use to poke me. As if that weren’t bad enough they started cramming nasty pills down my throat twice a day after taking me home. To ensure my cooperation, they even had the nerve to withhold food until I submitted to this abuse.

After suffering two weeks of this, they took me back to the evil man and he made noises about growing crystals in my pee or something like that. His solution, switch me over to even crappier kibbles than the diet ones I’d had before and start drinking more distilled water every day. Oh, and he wanted to extend my pill punishment for another week beyond the week I had left!

A few more days of that and I was about at the end of my rope. So I started off by peeing in the masters’ suitcase twice in one night! They escalated past that by giving me a bath! The next day they tried to lock me up in a bathroom after that with nothing but lousy prescription kibbles, but I broke out and got into their bedroom. I figured I’d show them good by peeing in their comforter. No, that’s not enough of a statement. So then I crapped on their papers and then smeared it on the wall. Top that silly humans.

An Engineer’s Guide to Cats

Published on April 15, 2008 in Geek. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , .

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.

Space & Rocket Center

Published on March 23, 2008 in Geek, General and Photography. Closed Tags: , , , , , .

Finally caught up with going through my photos and uploading to Flickr. Katie was in town visiting this past week (Spring Break). Aside from the holy week activities (choir tired now), one afternoon Amanda and I took off work and all three of us went to the Space & Rocket Center. Lots of interesting historical NASA stuff (early V-2 rockets, Saturn V/Apollo stuff, etc), but I have to admit some of it felt a bit slapped together. Amanda’s description of the presentation in the new Saturn V building: “high school science project… factually accurate, but looked like it was printed up on the parents’ inkjet printer and put in a cheesy plastic picture frame.” Since they only opened that recently, I can only assume it was a rush job and they’ll hopefully gloss it up a bit as time goes on.

The older part of the museum could definitely use a revamp though. Didn’t seem to be organized in a way that someone without a fair bit of previous rocket/NASA knowledge would get much out of it. Felt like what you’d get when you ask a bunch of scientists to design a museum. Again, factually correct, but rather dry and lacking the polish you’d hope for in a museum that was aiming to appeal to the general public. The multimedia parts felt really dated. While they’d spent the bucks on upgrading to nice fancy plasma TVs, they were still obviously playing videos produces back in the ’80s that were being played back on VHS tapes that dated back to the same time period. Ignoring the crappiness of ’80s production values, the audio and video quality were pretty lousy to the point where you were glad they had the closed captions turned on everywhere so you had some idea what they were actually saying. I distinctly remember one video that had some cheesy ’80s music that sounded like a bunch of kids singing at the bottom of a well…

More photos from Savannah trip: Museum of Aviation

Published on March 23, 2008 in Photography. Closed Tags: , , , .

On the drive back from Savannah, Charles and I quickly stopped in to visit the Robins Air Force Base Museum of Aviation. Didn’t spend very long there, but it wasn’t too much out of the way for the drive back and had a chance to take a few pics. There were some more unusual planes there that I’d meant to go back and look up info on, but obviously hadn’t since I only just pulled the photos off my camera a few days ago with the rest of the photos from Savannah.

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:



garfield minus garfield

Published on March 15, 2008 in General. Closed Tags: , , .

Ran across this site recently, and I’m not sure I could describe it any better than the site itself does:

Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb.

Check it out!