geek gag order

This is from the comments in an earlier post:

Anonymous said...

Can you give us some linpack benchmarks on 'it'? I'm very curious.

July 24, 2007 8:23 AM

Super Geek said...

Ah yes, dear reader. I wish I could give you specifics, but I am under a very strict NDA, and if I were to put any results up here, I could strongly affect stock prices, either up or down, for this particular company.

So no, while I would LOVE to tell the world what I know, I just can't.

July 27, 2007 9:08 AM

vacation

been vacatin'

for geeks only

I have nothing to say but this:

Cpu0 : 0.4% us, 0.4% sy, 0.0% ni, 97.7% id, 1.5% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Cpu1 : 0.3% us, 0.1% sy, 0.0% ni, 99.4% id, 0.1% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Cpu2 : 0.1% us, 0.0% sy, 0.0% ni, 99.9% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Cpu3 : 0.1% us, 0.0% sy, 0.0% ni, 99.9% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Cpu4 : 0.0% us, 0.1% sy, 0.0% ni, 99.8% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Cpu5 : 0.1% us, 0.1% sy, 0.0% ni, 99.7% id, 0.1% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Cpu6 : 0.0% us, 0.0% sy, 0.0% ni, 99.9% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Cpu7 : 0.1% us, 0.0% sy, 0.0% ni, 99.9% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Cpu8 : 0.1% us, 0.0% sy, 0.0% ni, 99.9% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Cpu9 : 0.1% us, 0.1% sy, 0.0% ni, 99.5% id, 0.2% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Cpu10 : 0.0% us, 0.0% sy, 0.0% ni, 99.9% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Cpu11 : 0.1% us, 0.0% sy, 0.0% ni, 99.9% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Cpu12 : 0.0% us, 0.0% sy, 0.0% ni, 99.9% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Cpu13 : 0.1% us, 0.1% sy, 0.0% ni, 99.7% id, 0.1% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Cpu14 : 0.0% us, 0.0% sy, 0.0% ni, 99.9% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Cpu15 : 0.1% us, 0.0% sy, 0.0% ni, 99.9% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si

Now, I can't tell you anything about this, but I can say it isn't intel, that it is really cool, and, not many people have been allowed to touch it or see it yet. But, here I am, touching all of it! Ha!

If you figured out what I've gotten a hold of, you can rest assured that no one will be disappointed with it, whatever 'it' is.

...and now for something completely different

Here's some random moron smashing his head into the crate that the magnum was shipped in. What a tool.

And, since this is UT, a picture of the magnum with the ever-present longhorns mounted on top. Eat that, every other University!

First Beta Rack of the new Sun Constellation system

The new beta version of the Sun Constellation series has arrived! this is the back of it as it is being unloaded from the crate. Please keep in mind that no one in the world has one of these. Pretty awesome.

Here is the front of the rack, after being moved into place, with no blades in it.


And here is a blurry shot of the actual blades that will be going in - quad cpu slots that will each hold quad amd barcelona chips. Once again, no one has any of these - they are all beta units.

(editor's note: these blades are not quad-cores, these are just run of the mill dual core systems)

We've turned on and installed two of the blades, and they are really fast! We've also tested the magnum switch, and it passed all the tests with flying colors. Just as fast as they claimed it would be, and only one tiny issue that is software related, and we should be good to go.

Biggest Switch in the World for the Biggest Computer in the World

So, today, one of the many heads of Sun is announcing the new Infiniband Switch, called Magnum, which will be the biggest switch of its kind in the world. 3,456 ports, in a fat-tree configuration, this switch will be the first of its kind, although with a different name, I'm sure (who wants to fight a copyright battle with a condom manufacturer?).

This switch will be one of two for the entire system, and will comprise the spine and nervous system for the biggest supercomputer in the world.

As you can see in the above picture, there was a huge, head-sized hole punched in the side of the crate when it arrived here. After unpacking, we determined that it was only superficial. I just know that made some people sweat, seeing as how we are receiving the ONLY copy of this switch in the entire world - wouldn't want it to get screwed up in transit.

Here are the extra parts that come with the main chassis - the line cards, and all the cable management, etc.

Here is the empty box! How exciting! This is right after it was rolled off the pallet.

And now, the back! OOOOOOOh. AAAAAAAAh.

And a little magnum frontal action, too! This is pre-line card/filler panel install. Please start salivating now.

The great thing about this is, no one else has one! You can probably order it after today, but good luck getting it any time this year!

Odds and Ends

It's been 16 days since my last post, and there are many good reasons for that.

We've been chugging along, installing and testing, testing and reinstalling. Lots and lots of work to do. I've been putting in insane hours trying to get everything ready for the main components to arrive. Here are some neat details. 1st, a picture of knoppix booting on one of the X4600s.
Each penguin in that picture represents a CPU. In 3 months, you would see that boot with 16 penguins! Those would each represent 1 of the 4 cores in the new AMD 4core barcelona chip.

Next, I managed to figure out the way that Thumpers, or X4500's, boot. Grub on an X4500 is a very weird, fickle thing. You have to relax your brain and accept that it will not act the way you think it should.

When you are installing Rocks on a thumper, it can only see the first 24 drives, only one of which is bootable. It is very unfortunate that Sun decided to put the two bootable drives on the same scsi controller, since if you lose the controller, you can't boot. But whatever.

Here's how to get a thumper to boot with grub in linux. Install to /dev/sdy - while installing, the OS, via anaconda, sees the bootable disk as sdy - the 24th disk. At the end, you want to install grub to this disk (a quick synopsis of this is, in grub: device (hd1) /dev/sdy;root (hd1,0); setup (hd1);).

Once you have marked the drive with the grub magic, you now need to set up grub.conf to point to, get this, hd0. Yes, I know you set grub up on what you defined as hd1, but just accept this and move on.

While the machine is booting, the BIOS of the X4500 only present grub with two disks - disk 0 and disk 1. So in grub.conf, you need to point to 0, like this: root (hd0,0). Then, tell it where you installed root (like /dev/sdy1), so that once grub loads, it can find the kernel, etc. That is where I got hung up - I kept thinking grub would see what I defined as hd1, but it couldn't see it - it could only see hd0.

I know I'm not really explaining it well, but that's all that you need to do.