Thursday December 18, 2008

I realize Amazon is, like its namesake, a high-volume operation. And I realize this can lead to some seemingly bizarre behavior in the quest to streamline operations. Even so, the amount of sheer waste of materials I've seen in some recent shipments boggles the mind.

Today my wife received a medium-sized box that included forty linear feet of inflated plastic packaging material to fill the mostly empty box and prevent the (unbreakable items) from moving around during shipment.

Yesterday, I received a box that was roughly 12" X 4" X 9.5" or about 456 cubic inches. Inside was one hard-plastic, unbreakable object that was 0.75" X 1.75" X 1" or about 1.3 cubic inches. By volume about 0.3% that of the box. This could easily have been sent in a padded envelope, but instead a sizeable cardboard box and additional plastic packaging material were all wasted to ship this item.

Yes, everything is recyclable, but that does not make this practice acceptable. Especially when one considers the volume of Amazon's operations worldwide.

A busy day for fresh HPC bits, apparently...

The Sun Grid Engine team is looking for experienced SGE users interested in taking their latest Update release for a test drive. The Update includes bug fixes, but also some new features as well. Two features in particular caught my eye: a new GUI-based installer and optimizations to support very large Linux clusters (think TACC Ranger.)

Full details are below in the official call for beta testers. The beta program will run until February 2nd, 2009. Look no further for something to do during the upcoming holiday season. :-)

Sun Grid Engine 6.2 Update 2 Beta (SGE 6.2u2beta) Program

This README contains important information about the targeted audience of this beta release, new functionality, the duration of this SGE beta program and your possibilities to get support and provide feedback.

1. Audience of this beta program
2. Duration of the beta program and release date
3. New functionality delivered with this release
4. Installing SGE 6.2u2beta in parallel to a production cluster
5. Beta program feedback and evaluation support

1. Audience of this beta program

   This Beta is intended for users who already have experience with the Sun Grid Engine software or DRM (Distributed Resource Management) systems of other vendors. This beta adds new features to the SGE 6.2 software. Users new to DRM systems or users who are seeking a production ready release should use the Sun Grid Engine 6.2 Update 1 (SGE 6.2u1) release which is available from here.

   For the shipping SGE 6.2u1 release we are offering a free 30 day evaluation email support.

2. Duration of the Beta program and release date

   This beta program lasts until Monday, February 2, 2009. The final release of Sun Grid Engine 6.2 Update 2 is planned for March 2009.

3. New functionality delivered with this release

   Sun Grid Engine 6.2 Update 2 (SGE 6.2u2) is a feature update release for SGE 6.2 which adds the following new functionality to the product:

   • a GUI based installer helping new users to more easily install the software. It complements the existing CLI based installation routine.
   • new support for 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Microsoft Windows Vista (Enterprise and Ultimate Edition), Windows Server 2003R2 and Windows Server 2008.
   • a client and server side Job Submission Verifier (JSV) allows an administrator to control, enforce and adjust jobs requests, including job rejection. JSV scripts can be written in any scripting language, e.g. Unix shells, Perl or TCL.
   • consumable resource attributes can now be requested per job. This makes resource requests for parallel jobs much easier to define, especially when using slot ranges.
   • on Linux, the use of the 'jemalloc' malloc library improves performance and reduces memory requirements.
   • the use of the poll(2) system call instead of select(2) on Linux systems improves scalability of qmaster in extremely huge clusters.

4. Installing SGE 6.2u2 in parallel to a production cluster

   Like with every SGE release it is safe to install multiple Grid Engine clusters running multiple versions in parallel if all of the following settings are different:

   • directory
   • ports (environment variables) for qmaster and execution daemons
   • unique "cluster name" - from SGE 6.2 the cluster name is appended to the name of the system wide startup scripts
   • group id range ("gid_range")

   Starting with SGE 6.2 the Accounting and Reporting Console (ARCo) accepts reporting data from multiple Sun Grid Engine clusters. Following the installation directions for ARCo and using a unique cluster name for this beta release there is no risk of losing or mixing reporting data from multiple SGE clusters.

5. Beta Program Feedback and Evaluation Support

   We welcome your feedback and questions on this Beta. Weask you to restrict your questions to this Beta release only. If you need general evaluation support for the Sun Grid Engine software please subscribe to the free evaluation support by downloading and using the shipping version of SGE 6.2 Update 1.

   The following email aliases are available:

   • Technical support alias: sge-beta@sun.com
   • Feedback on documentation: sge-beta-doc@sun.com
   • General feedback: sge-beta-feedback@sun.com

(2008-12-18 11:30:25.0) Permalink Comments [0]
Fresh Bits: InfiniBand Updates for Solaris 10

Fresh InfiniBand bits for Solaris 10 Update 6 have just been announced by the IB Engineering Team:

The Sun InfiniBand Team is pleased to announce the availability of the Solaris InfiniBand Updates 2.1. This comprises updates to the previously available Solaris InfiniBand Updates 2. InfiniBand Updates 2 has been removed from the current download pages. (Previous versions of InfiniBand Updates need to be carefully matched to the OS Update versions that they apply to.)

The primary deliverable of Solaris InfiniBand Updates 2.1 is a set of updates of the Solaris driver supporting HCAs based on Mellanox's 4th generation silicon, ConnectX. These updates include the fixes that have been added to the driver since its original delivery, and functionality in this driver is equivalent to what was delivered as part of OpenSolaris 2008.11. In addition, there continues to be a cxflash utility that allows Solaris users to update firmware on the ConnectX HCAs. This utility is only to be used for ConnectX HCAs.

Other updates include:

• uDAPL InfiniBand service provider library for Solaris (compatible with Sun HPC ClusterTools MPI)
• Tavor and Arbel/memfree drivers that are compatible with new interfaces in the uDAPL library
• Documentation (README and man pages)
• A renamed flash utility for Tavor-, Arbel memfull, Arbel memfree, and Sinai based HCAs. Instead of "fwflash" this utility is rename "ihflash" to avoid possible namespace conflicts with a general firmware flashing utility in Solaris

All are compatible with Solaris 10 10/08 (Solaris 10, Update 6), for both SPARC and X86.

You can download the package from the "Sun Downloads" A-Z page by visiting http://www.sun.com/download/index.jsp?tab=2 and scrolling down or searching for the link for "Solaris InfiniBand (IB) Updates 2.1" or alternatively use this link.

Please read the README before installing the updates. This contains both installation instructions and other information you will need to know before running this product.

Please note again that this Update package is for use on Solaris 10/08 (Solaris 10, Update 6) only. A version of the Hermon driver has also been integrated into Update 7 and will be available with that Update's release.

Congratulations to the Solaris IB Hermon project team and the extended IB team for their efforts in making this product available!


(2008-12-18 08:06:27.0) Permalink Comments [0]

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