As mentioned previously, I have been planning to benchmark some new low power AMD and Intel Quad cores. My motivation is the Limulus Project. Even though these processors are low-power desktop devices they work similarly to their big brother HPC versions. When Intel or AMD...
One of the issues facing the HPC market/community is the lack of good system administrators for clusters. Many believe this issue holds back the market and I have to agree. I don't think, however, that being a Linux cluster administrator is all that much different...
Last fall, I decided to purchase an SSD (Solid State Disk). The prices have come down and it makes sense to at least try one of these devices. SSD technology is interesting because every time you write to the drive, it degrades. Of course the...
This week I continue my experiments with my new SSD (Solid State Drive). I don't want to give away the whole story, but I may find it hard to go back to spinning disks. Before, I get to all the good news, let's talk about...
The recent release of the AMD "Llano" processors may not have attracted very much attention in the HPC world. It should have. The Llano processors are some of the first Fusionprocessors to hit the market. Simply put, the AMD Fusion processors are placing both the...
My first exposure to Linux was the Slackware distribution back in the early 1990's. I don't remember exactly how it was installed, but all I remember there were a bunch of binary and source files on a CD. By today's standard, the number of packages...
If you have read any of my articles and columns over the past several years, you will notice that I get on my "parallel programming soapbox" and browbeat anyone who will listen. My basic message is as follows. "Due to multi-core, everyone (who writes code)...
RAID 5 protects against a single disk failure. Remember that. Those wonderfully cheap and big SATA drives are commonly specified with an unrecoverable read error rate (URE) of 10^14 bits. This means that once every 10^14 bits the drive will be unable to read a sector....
I am often asked, "Is it hard to write parallel programs" The short answer is a resounding "yes." My answer is sincere and my intention is to scare away those that don't like a challenge. Like many programming questions, the devil is in the details...
Previously I wrote about my Linux SSD Experience. I have been using the system for a while and have become quite accustom to SSD speeds. A 64 GByte SSD can be had for just over $100 and is well worth the investment. A typical Linux...