Dan's Blog: For What it's worth.

I feel a little out of the loop this year, one that Java ONE just snuck up and it happening now and that I am not attending and have not been following the news... time to get my head out of the sand I guess.

For what it's worth

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Three days last week I took a little vacation to head down to Indianapolis for the Worship Facility Expo where I rocked it out making drinks at the Aspen, Cogun, Third Place Consulting booth. I was there to help share what God is doing at the cafe at my home church, share how a third place at someone's home church can be used to the Glory of the Lord and to make some awesome drinks. The conversation that took place and the people that I had the pleasure of meeting were well worth the time and investment. Who knows, I met get a chance to do it all over again in the fall. Now to figure out how to up my home espresso machine to a Nouva...

For what it's worth.

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Last week I was on some travel for work that took my from my home around the world to Edinburgh, UK to work on a large cluster of Sun v20z nodes. This is an internal cluster that will further enhance what we can test and try out with our products. More on the cluster to come... now for the adventure.

My manager called and asked if I wanted to fly over to Scotland to setup Nessie... that is right, we have a corny nickname for the cluster that matches the region of the world in which it is located. Of course I said that I would travel the world to setup a massive cluster so that we could make Sun HPC ClusterTools a more rock solid product. I have a passion for playing with the hardware as well as the software and have not been able to do that for some time. After the right folks all signed off I was given the green light to pack the bags and book the travel. So off I went.

I left the United States late one evening and landed in Amsterdam, Netherlands the next day on my birthday. On the flight over I watched, The Simpsons Movie, and American Gangster. I had a 11 hour layover so I headed into the city to walk around a bit. My plan was to first find a nice little cafe to have a coffee at, notice I said cafe instead of coffeehouse there is a difference. I chatted a bit with the barista and got some good directions on where to head to just browse around the city. I was pointed down a small side street to reach the canals and which ones might be better to see. While walking around with the day pack, the earbuds in and a camera out... I am sure I stood out like a tourist. Now after some wondering around a bit along with the lack of sleep I think I was basically lost, well that would mean that I knew where I was to begin with. I was just about to ask for directions when I saw the train station. I stopped by a small pub close the train station for a birthday drink. After that I headed back to the airport for a nap. Late that day I arrived in Edinburgh and off to the hotel for a couple hours of sleep before I headed off to the Sun facility to get cranking on the cluster setup.

After arriving a little late for my first day of cluster hacking (man I needed even more sleep) I was hooked up with some of the local folks on sight, given the quick ESD overview and pointed to the lab. The cluster will consist of 1024 v20z nodes, each with two AMD procs. The nodes are broken down 32 to a rack and there will thus be 32 racks. By the time I left we had the SPs up on 576 and Solaris installed or ready to be installed on 480 of them... ran out of hardware to get the three other racks up with Solaris. The other 14 racks are waiting for a power issue in the lab to be resolved and then they can come up online. I don't take all the credit, the local folks all ready had the racks in place and power to them and I was joined by a colleague from the London area.

While spending the week in Edinburgh I did venture out for dinner each night and a little sight seeing. Note, that almost all of the shops close at 18:00, plan accordingly. I had some great food while out in the city including some local favorites... fish and chips, bangers and mash. I did not partake of traditional Scottish breakfast... I stuck to my americano and muffin from one of the cafes right by the hotel. The Edinburgh castle was amazing and all of the sites along the royal mile. A full collection of photos from the trip can be found over here.

The travel home was a little eventful, I was delayed leaving Edinburgh do to a security issue with baggage on the flight I was on. By the time it was resolved all the bags were removed from the plane, laid out on the tarmac, each person had to claim their bags, re-board the plane, the extra bag was identified, removed and the flight finally took off... two hours late and two connections in Amsterdam down the drain. I stand behind the pilots decision to ensure that the correct bags were accounted for and unknown bags were not onboard in this day and age of travel. All delays aside, KLM is my new favorite airline. Their level of customer service is second to none. I have not flown Southwest or Jet Blue but the KLM folks know how to do it right for their passengers in flight, the counter crew could be a little more friendly. On the flights home I watched The Bourne Ultimatum and The Kite Runner. I finally made it home 17 hours later than I was set to and a couple hours late for my little girls birthday party. No worries, I was here for the presents and the cake but missed the pinata.

All and all a great trip and a wonderful experience... I would head back anytime to work on the cluster and to help bring the over half up when the power issue is worked out.

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The coffee abroad has not been to decent to date. Had a nice americano in Amsterdam at Coffee Connection, Dave was great barista. The coffee on flights and at the hotel are a pass. Stopped by Caffe Nero yesterday for the latte above, a bit less than I am use to. The americano this morning from Nero was proper and good to the last drop.

For what it's worth.

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Some great behind the scenes pics of space shuttle processing, rarely seen by the general public. Worth at least a quick glance through.

For what it's worth.

Arizona Coffee to be acquired by Starbucks.

The ClusterTools 8 (CT8) Early Access 1 (EA1) release is now available.

The CT8 EA1 software is a set of MPI libraries and tools for launching parallel MPI jobs on Solaris (SPARC and x86/x64). New in CT8 EA1 is MPI profiling support via VampirTrace and MPI PERUSE, Infiniband multi-rail communication, support for C++ applications built with libstlport4 or C++ standard, as well as other fixes and features contributed to Open MPI by the community.

CT8 EA1 is based on the upcoming Open MPI 1.3 release.

For what it's worth.

For a while now Open MPI has had heterogeneity support back into the source base. In the current version of Sun HPC ClusterTools 7.1 that is based on Open MPI, the heterogeneity testing did not fair so well base on that rev. of the source base. Big thanks to George and Brian for the work that was put into getting the code to work and I am sure many more along the way for additional support. Fast forward to the current source base that I have built and install on some nodes in the lab, Solaris/SPARC and Solaris/x64, and I kicked off the heterogeneity testing again. I have to say that I am happy to say that the limited testing of MPI jobs that I kicked off all passed. So I was seeing MPI communication on the mixed architecture cluster in the lab. From a ClusterTools perspective this is not officially qualified but looks to be something we might see in a future release. So what's next? Back to the lab to test out some other configurations like Solaris/SPARC, Solaris,x64 and Linux/x64.

So why is this anything to worry about? Think about places that have several "clusters" sitting around that they have had for a while... each time they built a new cluster it was a different OS or a different architecture... now they take an start using the entirety of their resources with a version of Open MPI that they can kick off large scale MPI jobs on. Why waste idle CPU cycles when you can put them to use.

For what it's worth.

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It is that time of year again, time for me to start telling you all about my love of backpacking. This year we are going to try to get a couple day hikes along with the multi day trips. The first one that we have planned is a 19 mile day hike... So to enter this new endeavor I picked up a day pack. No for those light weight packers this will not be the pack for you, even though it is a day pack it still weighs in at 3 lb 14 oz. I am going to feel it out for a few days and then make the final call to keep it.

First impressions of the Bigelow Day Pack:

• positives
  • side load as well as top load the main compartment
  • built in rain cover
  • small strap above the water bladder compartment to help the bladder up even as it becomes empty
  • nice cross tightening straps to keep the load tight and secure (load should be minimal for a day hike, but could be use if I can find out how to use this for a short multi day, or multi day pack for my wife when I carry my full pack)
  • nice venting in the back panel
  • full waist belt for load control
  • top lid even in a day pack
  • big back and side stack pockets for the times you don't want to get into the main compartment
  • two large mess pockets
• negatives
  • weight... there are lighter day packs on the market
• undecided observations
  • small stack pocket in the waist belt

Time to hit the trails...

For what it's worth.

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Just a quick update on work, I have been working on getting ClusterTools ready for delivery through Indiana.

For what it's worth.

Join the chinposin revolution! [1] [2]

Watch it, worth you time... choose the right platform. Originally posted via Alec's blog.

For what it's worth.

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I give this guy props for showing off commitment to the craft.

I sent my wife the link... and got the following back, "don't even think about it". If you have some ink that shows off your dedication to the career you are in post the links in the comments.

For what it's worth.

Back when our first child was born a colleague gave me the most precious little shirt and #1 wore it and now #2 has had the privilege of wearing it.

For what it's worth.

So I go to transfer our girls cloths from the washer to the dryer the other day when what did I find, but a super hero clinging to the inside...

I came running out of the laundry room, grab the camera and rushing back in telling my wife she needed to follow me. What a precious shot and some good laughs. Oh, Spider Man was a sticker that was on one of the girls shirts before it went into the wash... now he is a super clean super hero.

For what it's worth.

So the work is done some by my little coding hands and some by JS, a huge thanks to JS for his work and leadership on this. The Open MPI C++ library is now agnostic from being tied to either Cstd or stlport4. Now in the userland apps one is free to use whatever they would like. There was some sticky code in the previous implementation that used a data structure that did not allow for being agnostic. For those tracking on Sun ClusterTools this will show up in CT8.

For what it's worth

So yesterday I borrowed the neighbors two stage snow blower to clear the 12 inches of snow from our driveway and sidewalk. Even with the snow blower it was a lot of work. We have made the decision in our household to do it, we are going to just purchase our own. Sorry that I did not take before and after pictures of this snow fall, you can see photos of a large snow fall a few years back... that is when I shoveled it all by hand.

For what it's worth.

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Still have not kicked back into blog land, now I missed the SXDE post (still coming). Working on a c++ issue in Open MPI and now going to dig out from a big storm pounding Michigan.

No I have not fallen off the planet just the blog train. The keyboard sucks me in and I can't make it over to the browser to hack out a blog post. I recall that when I first started to blog I forced myself to do it five days a week for the first month... in which time I rambled a bit about everything. I have an upcoming entry on SXDE.

For what it's worth.

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