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.”
To celebrate, here’s some awesomeness from Mobile, AL: Leprechaun in Mobile, Alabama
So last November, I finally got a smartphone (through work no less). Gotta love not having to pay that monthly phone+data bill. The iPhone always had a lot of appeal to me, but the thought of having to switch to AT&T wasn’t especially attractive to me. I’m not big on the restrictions Verizon usually places on their phones (let’s disable all the features of your phone out so we can force you to use an expensive VZW service instead and nickle-and-dime you to death). But it’s hard to beat their coverage. Long story short (too late), I ended up with a Motorola Droid running Google’s Android OS.
As a followup to my snow photos from Champaign at Christmas, here’s a sample of a few photos documenting what it takes to shutdown much of Huntsville:
Finally getting around to going through photos I’ve taken recently and uploaded a set I took of the snow while we were in Champaign for Christmas. Here’s a sample that I liked with Sarah chasing Rachel down the street with a snow shovel full of snow:
I’ve been a happy happy joy joy subscriber at eMusic since 2005. I wasn’t sure what I thought initially when Lee clued me into it (indie music being a new thing for me), but after that first month I was hooked. Took me a few months and then I bumped up to the annual subscription option. Until recently, my most recent subscription plan worked out to $16/month, which got me 90 tracks a month.
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).
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.
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.
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.