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ballen's comments

ballen | 3 years ago | on: The Frontier computer, which broke the exascale barrier in 2022

Believe you’re thinking of the HPC facilities at LLNL and LANL. Frontier is run under DOE ASCR as one of the Leadership Computing Facilities (LCF), which focus mainly on open science use cases. Most of the compute hours in the LCFs is allocated via DOE INCITE and ALCC programs.

ballen | 8 years ago | on: BitScope: 3000-core Raspberry Pi cluster computer

32-bit vs 64-bit is largely inconsequential when the nodes only have 1-2GB of RAM. The ecosystem I'm referring to means you can run a vanilla Linux on a RPi with no extra work. You can google a problem and have a reasonable chance of finding a solution around the RPi and so on.

ballen | 8 years ago | on: BitScope: 3000-core Raspberry Pi cluster computer

Another neat use-case for this hardware is scale testing of systems management tooling, eg. provisioning, configuration management. HPC centers are looking at the possibility of having to manage 100k+ nodes in a single cluster.

Additional links:

http://cluster.bitscope.com

http://www.lanl.gov/discover/news-release-archive/2017/Novem...

My favorite form factor to go build a Pi-like Cluster is something like this: http://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&p....

- Gigabit Ethernet MAC on-board, Pine64's SOPINE and Raspberry Pi Compute Module both require per node networking components to be on the carrier board.

- Basic headers used for connecting to a carrier board

- Carrier board "only" needs an embedded switch and 5v power. However, I've not yet come across an embedded switch yet that has a non-blocking ratio of 1GbE ports to 10/25GbE uplinks.

- Carrier board should probably be mini-ITX or other standard form factor to fit in existing chassis. Form factor and embedded switch options are going to limit the number of nodes per carrier board.

ballen | 14 years ago | on: 135 Terabytes for $12,000

I've also done three of these builds so far. Used the SC847A chassis with direct iPass cable access (i.e. no port multipliers), 4 drives per cable. Downside is you need 9x SFF-8087 connectors on controllers, and 9 iPass cables to somehow route. Don't get the SM iPass cables, TrendNet makes better ones. Upside is you have dedicated SAS2 bandwidth from the drive all the way though the controller and the PCIe bus. Likely overkill. Also a tip, you can mount 4x internal 2.5in or 2x 3.5in drives. SM has the part numbers for the brackets on the chassis' product page. Don't put anything you'd remotely want to hot swap in these brackets, they will be buried under the motherboard tray.

I've used 4x LSI Logic 9211-8i controllers plus the onboard of the SM X8DTH-6F. Both the onboard and the 9211-8i use the LSI 2008 chipset. I have Solaris and ZFS setting on top of these, so I don't have hardware raid.

This is actually very solid hardware so far. I had a PSU fail and thats it. Let me know if you have any questions.

ballen | 14 years ago | on: Going Paper-Free for $220

The Canon PIXMA MX870 lets you scan and print over wifi. On a Mac you can even use Image Capture. It shows up under "Shared". I'm sure other Canon scanners have this feature as well.

ballen | 16 years ago | on: Django gaining or Rails waning?

Agreed, never used the main site. Apidock.com is my main source for Rails info. Also I think some of the Ruby micro-frameworks may be gaining popularity.

ballen | 16 years ago | on: PSA for Mac Users: Download Quicksilver

With Snow Leopard I'd say just use Spotlight. Its just as fast as QS, Lunchbar, or Google QSB for me. Since its built in and already running why bother using anything else? Of course I use it just to search and launch apps and files.
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