Back in Ames. Saw Harry Potter movie tonight. What lameness! I haven't read any of the books, but still I expected much more epicness and much less lame childishness. For crying out loud they have Christmas trees in a school for wizards and witches.
Fellowship of the Rings don't fail me now.
More conference going... exhibits and papers. Went to an IBM party and then a nice dinner with people from IBM and Myricom. Some photos of the show are up.
Most striking ideas from the conference so far... First, we all know Moore's Law (feature density increases lead to computer speed doubling every 18 months), but its network bandwidth corollary (network speed doubles every 9 months) is even wilder. The result is an order of magnitude difference in increase in 5 years. e.g. from 2001 to 2010 computers increase in speed by 60 times where networks will increase in speed by 4000 times. This has very interesting future system architecture implications. Second, HPC and other computing niches are dead... we will soon all use whatever systems are needed by webfarms 
I've heard that it's possible to get pretty good HPL results on a ethernet cluster (like at least 50% effiency) with some HPL.dat tuning. This is something I'll have to explore soon.... could get a lot more clusters into the top500 with it.
Yesterday..
Grid computing a larger than I expected. Awesome working examples were given.
Check out the Cactus project for info on an great toolkit for enabling grid applications.
Found out about iperf which is a very easy to use tool for measuring bandwidth.. highly recomended.
Also, check out web100 for some cool high bandwidth TCP tuning stuff.
Met two people from Ames Lab when they sat down at the table I was having lunch at. Small world.
I made it to the City Center Marriott in Denver and walked three blocks to register for the show. It's going to be huge. I'm attending two grid computing related tutorial sessions tomorrow.
The new top500 list is out. I'm very happy to see the cluster I implemented in Korea made it to position #184.
I brought my camera, so expect lots of pictures of big toys.
I've been kind of idling for the past three weeks. Working on documentation and benchmarking IBM cluster stuff.
Went and saw Monsters, Inc. last night with O'Rourke. Good film for both the kiddies and the adults. Very enjoyable.
I'm doing a weeks worth of cluster implementation starting tomorrow.
The week after I'm in Denver at SC2001 - geeks with gigantic and expensive toys. I'm really looking forward to this conference... hope to learn a lot about grid computing and speak with a lot of people doing Linux clusters in HPC.
You are currently browsing the bohnsack.com weblog archives for November, 02001.
