Category Archives: Writing

Writing

Protect Your Family with the Kogan Portector!

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If you’re worried about spam and scams coming through the Internet Portal (thanks to Stephen Conroy for pointing that threat out) then get yourself a Kogan Portector! Here’s their advert for it on YouTube..

Of course you must be sure to read the disclaimer..

DISCLAIMER: The Kogan “Portector” Internet Filter is not a real product. This product is in no way affiliated with Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, The Australian Labor Party, or the Australian Government. Incorrect use may result in uncensored Internet content, freedom of speech, freedom of choice, freedom of thought, and protection of your civil liberties.

Phew, thanks Kogan for saving us!

VLSCI: Systems Administrator – High Performance Computing, Storage & Infrastructure

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Please note: enquiry and application information at the URL below, no agencies please!

Executive summary

Want to work with hundreds of TB of storage, HPC clusters and a Blue Gene supercomputer and have an aptitude for storage and data ?

http://jobs.unimelb.edu.au/jobDetails.asp?sJobIDs=624151

Background

To give you an idea of what this job relates to, VLSCI currently has in production:

  • 136 node, 1088 core SGI cluster (Intel Nehalem CPUs)
  • ~110TB usable of Panasas storage

Shortly arriving (< 1 month away):

  • 2048 node, 8192 core IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer
  • 80 node, 640 core IBM iDataplex cluster (Intel Nehalem CPUs)
  • ~300TB usable of IBM GPFS storage plus tape libraries

    • 2012 – more! πŸ˜‰

    Both Intel clusters are CentOS 5, the front end and service nodes for the Blue Gene are SuSE SLES 10. The GPFS servers are RHEL5. Panasas runs FreeBSD under the covers.
    Continue reading →

Filter Senator Conroy (.org)

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There’s a website now up called Filter-Conroy.org to persuade people in Victoria to vote below the line at the next federal election to sack Senator Conroy if he does not abandon his wrong-headed plans for mandatory ISP level censorship and waste valuable taxpayers funds (which could go to the police to fight paedophiles if the government really wanted to achieve something). I strongly commend this site to my fellow Victorian voters.

A (Red) Rising Star in the Latest Top500 Supercomputer List

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The 35th Top500 supercomputer list has just been released at ISC2010 in Germany, and it’s got some very interesting things in it.

Firstly, China has just got the #2 system on the Top500 with an nVidia GPU based cluster called Nebulae. At 1.271PF measured (Rmax) it’s just over 70% of the performance of the current #1 system Jaguar but (if you believe that it’s worth anything) on theoretical performance it’s 2.9PF beats out Jaguar’s 2.3PF – this means that if they can optimise Linpack some more for the architecture then perhaps they have a shot of overtaking Jaguar and taking #1 (assuming nothing larger comes along in the next 6 months).

Secondly China has also taken the #7 spot with an AMD GPU based cluster (notice a pattern here?) and now have 24 systems in the Top500 and have overtaken Germany to take the #2 spot in terms of total performance in a country at 2.9PF, though a long way behind the US with over 17PF total Rmax. I think the Chinese have arrived with a vengeance and I suspect they’re going to carry on boosting their capacity, especially as both their Top 10 systems are built by Chinese organisations.

Linux continues its domination of the Top500, increasing its share of systems from 446 (89.2%) in November 2009 to 455 (91%) today. Windows has just 5 systems in total, unchanged from last year. Tellingly it appears they are the same 5 as November as the stats are unchanged – it appears there may be stagnation in the uptake of Windows HPC at the high end.

Australia has just one system in the Top500, the Bureau of Meteorology / HPCCC Sun^WOracle cluster in Melbourne. It’s ranked at #113 with 49.5TF at which is pretty impressive. though I’m puzzled why its much bigger sibling at NCI/ANU in Canberra didn’t get a mention, perhaps they chose to just get it into production ASAP without faffing around with Linpack ? Based on their estimated Rpeak and the efficiency of the BoM machine I reckon they’d get an Rmax of about 128TF and would place about #35.

But without the NCI machine Australia ranks behind such well known HPC countries as Austria and Denmark and well behind the likes of New Zealand and India!

VLSCI Mid Year Call for Applications from Victorian Life Science Researchers

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A quick work related blog..

Today VLSCI announced its mid-year Call For Applications for use of the Peak Computing Facility at the University of Melbourne by life science researchers in Victoria. This includes time on our forthcoming IBM Blue Gene/P HPC system as well as the existing SGI Altix XE HPC cluster and a forthcoming IBM iDataPlex HPC cluster (both Intel Nehalem systems).

Pass it on!