I managed to find a Starbucks, but I swear it's following me everywhere I go!! To be honest, I don't like Starbucks because I think their coffee tastes like someone burned the beans. However I do like Seattle's Best and I managed to find one in Seattle - just across from Pike's Place Market. I also managed to reacquaint myself with the great Microbrewries that Seattle has. I also like the small glasses you can get so you can try all of the various offerings and still remain upright.

Anyway, on to the technical part of our show. I managed to run around the show floor a bit more on this last day! I stopped by the AMD booth which is a great way to see what people are doing because AMD's booth consists of a whole bunch of other companies showing their AMD specific stuff in the booth. Lots of fun!! I also stopped by the Verari and Penguin booths which I'll summarize more below.

AMD Booth

AMD had a number of companies in their booth. They had a neat pillar with a bunch of motherboards from various companies. Some of the boards had HTX slots (Hyper Transport eXtension) and some had dual sockets and quad sockets. One also had lots of DIMMs slots per socket (up to 8 in one case) which screams lots of memory.

PSSC Labs was showing a liquid cooled 1U server node that was very quiet. The key is that they are using small fans that run at about 6,000 rpm (the usual 1U fans run at about 12,000 to 13,000 rpm). Very sweet. Should be out later in 2006.

Penguin Computing was showing THE BEST bar none, desktop cluster I've seen. They have taken their Blade Runner 4U rack mount and turned it vertical and slightly repackaged it. In the AMD booth they had a 12 node, dual socket, dual core machine with GigE running Fluent. That makes, 48 cores in a single box that can fit underneath your desk. I'm not sure of the power or cooling requirements of the box, but this machine is simply amazing!!! I'll write more about in an SC05 wrapup article and I hope to have some picture if Penguin will let me publish them. :)

Verari had one of their blades on display in the AMD booth as well. It's a very nice blade that takes a COTS motherboard and turns it vertically along with a hard drive and power supply. Their rack then takes the blades and connects them to power and communication. Very nice setup I must say.

It's a quick blog I know, but I want to save more of the details for the SC05 wrapup. :)