Brandon E Taylor's Weblog Cogitations, Meditations, and Ruminations

Another Big HPC Win

Another great HPC win!

From http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/general/press/announcements/20060928_01.php:

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has made a five-year, $59 million award to the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin to acquire, operate and support a high-performance computing system that will provide unprecedented computational power to the nation’s research scientists and engineers.

...

TACC is partnering with Sun Microsystems to deploy a supercomputer system specifically developed to support very large science and engineering computing requirements. In its final configuration in 2007, the supercomputer will have a peak performance in excess of 400 trillion floating point operations per second (teraflops), making it one of the most powerful supercomputer systems in the world. It will also provide over 100 trillion bytes (terabytes) of memory and 1.7 quadrillion bytes (petabytes) of disk storage. The system is based on Sun Fire™ x64 (x86, 64-bit) servers and Sun StorageTek™ disk and tape storage technologies, and will use over 13,000 of AMD’s forthcoming quad-core processors.

As with the big TiTech win, N1 System Manager will be used to provide management for the compute nodes and N1 Grid Engine will be used for job scheduling and reporting.

You can download System Manager for free here and Grid Engine for free here. Don't forget to sign up for an Sun Developer Network account and check out the BigAdmin portal while you're at it. ( Sep 30 2006, 11:24:00 PM PDT ) Permalink

Don Williams Farewell Tour

Tiffany and I went to see Don Williams on his Farewell Tour at the Grizzly Rose - recognized by the Country Music Association as one of the best live country music clubs in the nation - in Denver last night. He certainly did not disappoint, playing for about an hour and a half. He started with Good Ole Boys Like Me and finished with You're My Best Friend, playing Louisiana Saturday Night as an encore.

There is something about Don William's straightforward music and lyrics, particularly the songs written by Bob McDill, that really resonates with me. His well known penchant for singing about the simple things in life and the importance of our relationships with one another is endearing. ( Sep 16 2006, 04:00:00 PM PDT ) Permalink

Random Shuffle

• "Stranglehold" - Ted Nugent

What a riff and what a solo! There are two things the Motor City Madman does very well - play guitar and hunt. Ted's clean living and his policy to only eat meat that he harvests himself (e.g. through hunting and fishing) probably has something to do with the fact the he is still rockin' hard at the age of almost 58.

• "Three Wooden Crosses" - Randy Travis

Wonderfully touching musical parable about the power of faith and redemption. Listen to this one twice to get the full effect (the end might be surprising to some when they first hear the song). "I guess it's not what you take when you leave this world behind you, It's what you leave behind you when you go."

• "Orange Blossom Special" - Ralph Stanley

One of the all-time classic banjo songs played by one of the all-time classic bluegrass banjo pickers. What more need I say?

• "Hall of the Mountain King" - Savatage

I fondly remember blowing my first set of car stereo speakers with this song. The song still makes we want to stand up and scream with Jon Oliva when he belts out (after a dramatic pause): "In the Hall of the Mountain King!!!" btw...you can hear an arrangement of Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King" in the previous track: "Prelude to Madness".

• "Walk a Little Straighter" - Billy Currington

A sobering - pun intended - and touching song about the awesome responsibility of being a parent and the effect our actions have on our children. Our children look to us as role models and stumbling around with a beer constantly in hand sets a poor example. ( Sep 09 2006, 10:52:00 PM PDT ) Permalink

Potty Trained by 2?

Two weeks ago, Caleb had his first successful self-initiated experience - a very satisfying #1 - with his potty chair. Today, he almost pulled off a "bifecta" with a self-initiated #1 AND #2 (I will spare you the details related to being almost successful). At 19 months, he seems to be making a lot of good progress. I suspect, however, that it would be remarkably over-ambitious to expect him to be fully potty trained by 2. A man can always hope, though. :-) ( Sep 08 2006, 01:15:00 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [1]

Steelers Start the Season with a Win

The Steelers start the season well, defeating the Miami Dophins 28-17, without their starting quarterback. It was by no means a perfect performance, but the Steelers were true to form, outrushing the Dolphins 143-38 and coming up with 2 key interceptions late in the game. It was also nice to see Heath Miller with over 100 yards receiving (even though some of those yards were the result of a blown call by the official). ( Sep 08 2006, 12:08:56 AM PDT ) Permalink