Ready or not, here we come

Throw some socks and underwear in a bag and head to Austin next week because the FLOPS are calling. That is right, SC08 is almost here (November 15-21).

As usually Jeff and I will be bringing you show coverage, but I wanted to get one event on your calender. This year marks the ninth annual Beowulf Bash or Beobash as we call it. In many respects, the Beobash is like a yearly reunion of many of those who shaped today's HPC market.

This years party also represents the folding of another cluster event into the Beobash. If the Beobash is the family reunion, the LECCIBG are the naughty boys (and girls) playing cards, drinking, and smoking out behind the reception hall. The idea started out innocently enough, but the event grew bigger than anyone ever imagined (or would admit under oath). The whole sorted history of the LECCIBG can be found elsewhere.

This years sponsors are AMD, Cluster Monkey, NVidia, Panasas, Penguin/Sclyd Computing, Terascala, and XAND Marketing. Thanks for supporting the community.

See You There!

lots of bits in lots of places

In the final part of our worlds biggest and best Parallel File Systems Review, we take a look at object based parallel file systems. Although this installment stands on its own, you may find it valuable to take a look at Part One: The Basics, Taxonomy and NFS and Part Two: NAS, AoE, iSCSI, and more! to round out your knowledge. Let's jump in! And, don't miss the biggest and best summary table I ever created on the last page.

Ever hear of an exabyte?

In our second part of File Systems O'Plenty we take a look at NAS, Distributed File Systems, AoE, iSCSI, and Parallel File Systems. In case you missed part one you can find it here. In this part, we will also point out why IO is important in HPC clustering. Many a CPU cycle is wasted waiting for that data block. Read on how to feed you data appetite.

Where to turn in a time of need. In need of MFLOPS, that is.

"The only constant is change" said Heraclitus, an ancient Greek philosopher. This is certainly true when describing the market of high-performance computing (HPC). The HPC market is characterized by a rapid change of architectures, technologies and usage. The only continuously steady characteristic of HPC is the ever-growing demand for performance, showing an increase of 100X every ten years based on the TOP500 list. The HPC market drives the computing technology further and evaluates many leading edge architectures. Proven solutions that have been widely adopted in the HPC are accepted in commercial high-performance computing markets such as automotive, oil and gas, financial, digital media, bio-science and mathematical modeling.