Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Will We Ever See InfiniBand in Desktop Computers?

Posted on July 31, 2014 by Konstantin S. Solnushkin

[Update: the post is not actually about InfiniBand as such, it’s more about convergence that can be brought by the new Intel Omni Scale Fabric :-) Please see the comment below the post, and thanks for your time!] When I … Continue reading →

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Exascale Supercomputers: Anything but Cheap

Posted on March 31, 2014 by Konstantin S. Solnushkin

Science and engineering both rely on the continuous increase in supercomputing performance. Back in 2009, it was believed that exascale machines will become available by 2018 — nine years ahead seemed like a lot of time. No one knew how … Continue reading →

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Storage Vendors, You Would Upset Henry Ford

Posted on April 30, 2013 by Konstantin S. Solnushkin

Certain storage vendors are allegedly selling replacement hard disk drives for their storage systems at inflated prices. I saw people complaining that their storage system will not accept a hard disk drive entirely identical to that found in their servers. … Continue reading →

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Latency Everywhere

Posted on December 17, 2012 by Konstantin S. Solnushkin

People from the high-performance computing field have a clear understanding that performance of technical systems (of various nature) is characterized by two metrics: throughput and latency. People in other fields sometimes focus on either throughput or latency alone. For many … Continue reading →

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“I’ll Start My Own Supercomputer Conference”

Posted on December 17, 2012 by Konstantin S. Solnushkin

Remember that moment from Futurama when Robot Bender promises to set up his own theme park? Forget about the theme park, because is seems that we now have several supercomputer conferences. Why? And does it do us any good? I … Continue reading →

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Lustre and Panasas Are Not So Different

Posted on August 21, 2012 by Konstantin S. Solnushkin

As vendors try to showcase their products, there is often confusion regarding the difference between two similar products, such as PanFS from Panasas, Inc. and Lustre (from Sun, then Oracle, then Whamcloud, then Intel). But in this particular case, the … Continue reading →

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Three Fat-tree Alternatives for the SuperMUC Cluster

Posted on April 22, 2012 by Konstantin S. Solnushkin

SuperMUC is a cluster supercomputer currently being deployed at Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Germany. As of today, 8,200 cores of 110,000 have been put into operation — it is a so-called migration system for early user access. (UPD: Deployment … Continue reading →

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X86 Has to Go Away, Revolution is Necessary

Posted on March 27, 2012 by Konstantin S. Solnushkin

Sometimes I visit big vendors’ presentations where they talk about their new servers. The audience — systems administrators, engineers, technicians — are listening very carefully, trying to grasp every word. They like to hear that the new server, equipped with … Continue reading →

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