IBM high-performance computing (HPC) clustered solutions offer significant price/performance advantages for many high-performance workloads by harnessing the advantages of low-cost servers plus innovative, easily available, open source and commercially available software.

Today, some businesses are using their own resources to build Linux and Windows clusters using commodity hardware, standard interconnects and networking technology; open source software; and in-house or third-party applications. Any savings realized from a potentially lower acquisition cost offered by these systems is offset by the expense and complexity of assembling, integrating, testing and managing these clusters from disparate, piece-part components.

IBM has designed the IBM System Cluster 1350 to help address these challenges. Our clients benefit from IBM’s extensive experience with HPC to help minimize complexity and risk. Using advanced Intel® Xeon®, AMD™ Opteron™ and IBM POWER6™-based server nodes, proven cluster management software, and optional high-speed interconnects, the Cluster 1350 offers the best of IBM and third-party technologies. As a result, clients can speed up installation of an HPC cluster, simplify its management and support, and reduce mean time to payback.

IBM System Cluster 1350

Georgia State’s new supercomputer allows for cutting-edge research

ATLANTA – Eric Hurst wants to know who is really in control of our country, and the Georgia State doctoral student in political science is using the university’s new supercomputer to get to the bottom of it.

Georgia State recently purchased an IBM System Cluster 1350 supercomputer through a partnership program between IBM and Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA), a consortium of more than 60 research institutions.

Able to make three-trillion calculations per second, the power of 320 desktop computers, Georgia State’s new supercomputer is the latest addition to the school’s expanding inventory of supercomputing resources that will benefit researchers in various disciplines.

Georgia State University's IBM Cluster 1350 Supercomputer

Introducing Cumulo BLAST
Turnkey BLAST Servers with Cumulo SAASi and Amazon EC2

BLAST is the most important data mining tool for bioinformatics applications. It's provided by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). Although there are various free BLAST servers available around the world, there is still a need for biologists to have their own BLAST servers. Typically, the NCBI and other BLAST servers can get bogged down with requests, and turn around times can be slow. Having your own BLAST servers can significantly improve the throughput of your BLAST pipelines.

Cumulo BLAST addresses this need by offering a turnkey BLAST server built using Cumulo SAASi and Amazon EC2. You simply have to start one or more Amazon EC2 instances that we supply, and you instantly have a BLAST server that can handle web service requests. You can start as many servers as you need to increase throughput to any desired level.

Cumulo - Computing in the Cloud

If you like CNBC you will probably not enjoy this clip. Jon Stewart, jilted by CNBC's Howard Beale-esque ranting reporter Rick Santellii, fills the time that would have been dedicated to an interview with more than 8 minutes of .... well, let's just say that we're glad that we're not them.

The aforementioned CNBC bashing really gets going at about 2:25.null

Takedowns: Jon Stewart Absolutely Destroys CNBC

100g caffeine

+

Upside Down Tomato Planter

=

ORGANIC TOMACCO. But with caffeine instead of Nicotine.

I have secured the grounds output of one coffee shop indefinitely. It is 50+ pounds a week. I will therefore have 2500+ pounds of well composted coffee come next year's planting season (figure some loss during composting, but I can get more coffee shops on board). It is about 2% nitrogen, not a bad fertilizer.

I find myself wondering if that much coffee grounds could caffeinate my vegetables.

So here is the plan:

1) Collect and accumulate grounds. I need them for compost/fertilizer no matter what.

2) Put 100g caffeine in the soil of one topsy turvy upside down tomato plant. They give you seeds but I think I'll use grape tomatoes.

3) Grow plant. Pick tomatoes.

4) Buy chemicals to extract caffeine from grape tomatoes. I did the extraction from tea/coffee in college, so the only tricky part will be getting the chemicals without getting raided by the DEA as a meth cooker.

If the grape tomatoes have significant amounts of caffeine in them:

5) Extract caffeine from grounds, then from well-composted grounds, to determine levels.

6) Spread grounds all in one concentrated area for growing caffeinated vegetables.

7) Extract caffeine from vegetables when they grow, to determine and verify caffeine levels. Label veggies as to caffeine content.

8) ????

9) PROFIT! Charge a premium for all naturally caffeinated, organic vegetables. Tomatoes. I might try some other plants in case those don't take it up well.

This is just about the stupidest, funnest business plan I can think of, so I will implement it immediately.

Organic Caffeinated Vegetables: A Business Plan

Sunday, November 27, 2005
Distributed Erlang and Firewalls
I have two Erlang nodes communicating with each other, one of which is behind a firewall. The Erlang distribution mechanism uses a couple of TCP ports that need to be opened in the firewall. The first is port 4369, used by 'epmd'. The second port is dynamically assigned which makes it difficult to configure the firewall.

Bluish Coder: Distributed Erlang and Firewalls

All of this gives us a rather different perspective on what the stock market is really telling us about the broader economy. The CEI is down about 10 percent since Election Day, is up about 10 percent since the last day of trading before Obama announced his "aggressive" stimulus, and is essentially unchanged since Obama's inauguration. The market is not becoming particularly more pessimistic about macroeconomic conditions (although it has certainly retained its previous pessimism) -- if this were true, we'd see cyclical stocks losing further value relative to more economically robust ones. But that largely isn't what we've been seen. Instead, the stock market is engaged in something of a pity party -- the prevailing emotions being fear and loathing. It is concerned about policies which might be burdensome to equityholders in large corporations while perhaps nevertheless being boons to economic recovery.

FiveThirtyEight.com: Politics Done Right: What the Stock Market Thinks About the Economy

A new service for ladies who are given phone numbers, which allows them to hear nightmare stories about those guys, before calling them back.

Funny!

Loser Pages

Although short stroking doesn’t get hard drives anywhere the access times of flash SSDs, we found that their access times still decrease by 40% in the case of the Ultrastar 15K450 SAS HDDs, and by an amazing 50% in the case of the Deskstar 7K1000.B SATA drives. The advantages are similar when the drives are configured in RAID modes. Since no future hard drive will be able to significantly shorten today’s access times, short stroking is an excellent technique for improving performance in a very noticeable way. Even the desktop 7K1000.B shows access times that are quicker than those of 10,000 RPM drives.

Tom's reduced access times on high end SATA drives as much as 40% by formatting only the outer 10-20% of the platters, to minimize seek times of the read heads.

Amusing.

Test Setup, Flash SSDs and Access Time - Review Tom's Hardware : Accelerate Your Hard Drive By Short Stroking

Today, we’re taking Twitpay out of beta and putting it out there for everyone to use. (If you don’t like to read long blog posts: we’re turning on “real money” powered by Amazon Payments. We’re excited. Twitpay is awesome.)

Congrats to twitpay for going live with real money!

Twitpay