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The news in this category has been selected by us because we thought it would be interestingto hard core cluster geeks. Of course, you don't have to be a cluster geek to read the news stories.

Living the terabyte lifestyle

Recently Henry Newman and Jeff Layton (distinguished ClusterMonkey) had dinner at a Cuban restaurant. While dinning, they discussed the disparity between Linux file system sizes and the growth rate of hard drives. They note:

"With 3TB, drives ext 3/4 maxes out at five disk drives. Jeff and I thought that was just insane, given you can buy five 3TB drives at Fry's and put them in your desktop. XFS maxes out at 33.3TB disk drives, and even that is far too small in our opinion. Clearly, supported file system sizes have not scaled with disk drives sizes or the demand for big data."

The full discussion, The State of File Systems Technology, Problem Statement, is at the Enterprise Storage Forum. It seems to be one of those, "wait a minute, wow, I never looked at that" moments. This issue is not just a concern for HPC or the high end issue, it really may hit home in some smaller installations. Note that the issue is not just file system sizes, but is also about performance. Henry and Jeff have a plan to explore this issue (see the end of the article).

While we are at it, read Joe Landman's What are xfs’s real limits? blog. And, check out the ensuing discussion. I respect Joe's opinion. Like me, he likes to make arguments based on hard data and benchmarks. (Like there is any other way...) We'll touch base on this again as the project continues.

Build your very own Watson Jr!

Image Just got word about a recipe for building your own IBM Watson. Of course you don't have to buy a rack of servers because Tony Pearson has outlined how to build a Watson Jr. What he suggests is small person cluster. Maybe one like this! Of course, you will loose some functionality needed to be on Jeopardy and some speed, but you can have a new friend in your basement (or garage, or bedroom). More to come. See our other Watson coverage below.

The shameless self promotion is at the end

The following news items have hit my radar screen recently. I'm sure I missed a lot of other important news, but here are some stories I found interesting. As always, there are plenty of links from which to explore further.

Speaking of HPC news, Jeff Squyres, fearless Open MPI Maven, has posted an interesting blog post called Unexpected Linux memory migration. Might want to read this one.

ImageAs I predicted, IBM's Watson pretty much trounced the humans. It was not a complete romp, however. The final score was $77,147 for Watson, $21,600 for Brad Rutter, and $24,000 for Ken Jennings. At it was an exhibition match, the $1,000,000 first prize goes to IBM (and then on to charity). Jennings earns $300,000 and Rutter comes away with $200,000. Both Jennings and Rutter said they will donate half their proceeds to charity. My assumption is IBM funded much of the event (it took place at their facility).

The third and final day was pretty much game playing. There was no background or build-up. I assume if you did not figure out what was going on by now, no amount of background was going to help. The second game was much closer then the first one. The human players actually got a chance to answer some questions.

ImageI suppose all the misery of flying around the country has finally given me an advantage. The final Jeopardy answer was, "Its largest airport was named for a World War II hero; its second largest, for a World War II battle." I knew the question right away and so did Jennings and Rutter. Watson's question was "What is Toronto ???" Sorry old boy, that is wrong. To his credit he did note his lack of confidence in the answer with three question marks.

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