Understanding Formatted Capacity versus Unformated Capacity

Have you wondered why Formatted Capacity is lesser than the Unformated Capacity of a Hard Disk. Do take a look at this article Formatted capacity confusion clarified

Storage hardware is using the base 10 system and software is using the base 2 system. So no storage is actually lost, it is just a question of how the information is represented.

DELL also recently announced a major layoff of up to 30% of their workforce recently.

If you thought that IBM selling its x86 business was the only shock in the x86 markets (Lenovo Plans to Acquire IBM’s x86 Server Business ). You may want to take a look at Dell looks to be heading toward staff layoffs of 20 to 30 percent


According to the article...... Sources familiar with the matter told The Register that along with laying off employees that work in the PC department, Dell is also cutting staff from other departments like enterprise software and storage

 but Dell spokemen refute the report claiming that the Refister's report on the layoff was inaccurate....

Waiting for further updates.....

Article - Intel® Solid-State Drive 910 Series Delivers High Performance, Endurance and Reliability for Data Center Tiering and Caching

An interesting article by Intel to address high-performning SSD.......

Intel® Solid-State Drive 910 Series Delivers High Performance, Endurance and Reliability for Data Center Tiering and Caching (Intel NewsRoom)

Another similar article can be found at Intel's PCI-E 910-Series SSD reviewed: blazing fast, even under pressure (Engadget)

Some of the hightlights:

1. PCIe-based 400GB and 800GB Intel SSD 910 Series provides extreme performance, endurance and reliability for rigorous data center demands.
2. Intel SSD 910 Series offers easy-to-install, seamless post-deployment server storage upgrade with no changes to existing server design.
3. Using Intel High Endurance Technology, Intel SSD 910 offers 10 full drive writes a day for 5 years for 30x endurance.*

CIO Awards 2012

CIO 2012 Awards Listing....including the CIO 100 Index (Pdf format) are in.

Intel Recommended Readings

I have always enjoyed Intel Press Books and Technology Journal. Their motto says it all - By developer for Developer. You can download the Recommended Reading List or look at some technical articles from Intel Industry . With the title or the ISBN, you can purchase the book from Amazon.com

Benefits from reading books on the Intel Recommended Reading List:

• Reduce the risk in your development cycle
• Leverage the latest technology & best practices
• Avoid costly design errors
• Create higher performance designs
• Accelerate your development process

EU wants Europe to be supercomputing superpower

The European Commission today unveiled plans to make Europe a leading light in high-performance computing (HPC).
The EC said there had been a “relative decline in HPC use and capabilities,” but it hopes that will be reversed with a doubling of investment in supercomputing......

For the rest of the article, do read EU wants Europe to be supercomputing superpower (IT Pro)

Companies Comparison for Storage in the Gartner Ranking

For information on companies selling storage boxes, do look at the article on
Ball-gazer casts magic runes to heal HP's credibility. Swallowing startups pushes up Gartner ranking.
NetApp and EMC are the leaders with NetApp ahead of EMC on the vision scale.

Using Intel Compilers with Eclipse IDE on Linux

Intel has come up with a dated documentation on Using Intel Compilers with Eclipse IDE on Linux. Still useful to give an idea of how to integrate the intel compilers to Eclipse

Intel® C++ Compiler for Linux* - Using Intel® Compilers with the Eclipse* IDE [PDF]

A interesting article on the history, roadmap and architecture of xCAT

From Clusters To Clouds: xCAT 2 Is Out Of The Bag from Linux Magazine written by Egan Ford

Yahoo! to open source floating its "internal serving" cloud

This article taken from The Register titled "Yahoo! to open source floating Google-Amazon crossbreed"

Early next year, Yahoo! intends to open source its internal "cloud serving" platform, described as something halfway between Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud and Google's App Engine....................

Moving HPC Applications to Cloud - The Practitioner Prospective

This is a very good summarise presentation by Victoria Livschitz, CEO of Grid Dynamics on some of the issues and challenges we will face when we unify Cloud and HPC into HPC-Cloud.

Read this: Moving HPC Applications to Cloud - The Practitioner Prospective

10GE Switches as viable consideration for HPC Interconnect

Take a look at this whitepapers on the tremendous inroad Ethernet has made to contest IB for the HPCC market

1. 10 GE Fabric Delivers Consistent High Performance for Computing Clusters at Sandia National Labs (Results from Sandia CBench benchmark tests demonstrate higher throughput using compared to statically routed InfiniBand)
2. Are we there yet? 10Gb Ethernet for HPC
3. Experiences with NFS over IB and iWARP RDMA

Implementation of HPC as a Service - the Shanghai Supercomputer Center

The Shanghai Supercomputer Center (SSC) was founded in December 2000. It is the first high performance computing platform open to the whole public in China and currently is the country’s leading supercomputer centre.......

Read more on HPC as a Service from Scientific Computing World

2 Storage Trends from SuperComputing 2009

This is an interesting articles about the rise of smaller storage vendors who is making wave with their storage innovation. An interesting read Two Storage Trends From SuperComputing 2009

Webkit Open Source Project

According to the WebKit Open Source Project website, WebKit is an open source web browser engine. WebKit is also the name of the Mac OS X system framework version of the engine that's used by Safari, Dashboard, Mail, and many other OS X applications.
 
The lightweight browser midori is another example

# aptitude install midori

Linux File System throughput performance

The articles from Linux Magazine

1. I Feel the Need for Speed: Linux File System Throughput Performance, Part 1 and
2. IOzone Performance Exploration, Part 2: The Rest of the Crowd (Almost)

are interesting writeup on throughput performance among the commonly and less-well known Linux file system. the benchmarking tool used is IOzone. IOzone is a filesystem benchmark tool. The benchmark generates and measures a variety of file operations. IOzone has been ported to many machines and runs under many operating systems.

Do take a look

Article on Red Hat Cloud Developments

A good article of Red Hat Cloud Developments. You can download some of the conference presentation slides from the Redhat Summit there as well.

The Google PageRank Algorithm

Curious about how Google PageRank your website, there is an excellent writeup on

1. What is Pagerank?
2. The Algorithm
3. How the Pagerank Calculator work
   
4. And more.....

Read http://www.markhorrell.com/seo/pagerank.html

EnFuzion3D 2009 enabling 3D Application in EC2 Cloud

EnFuzion® is the first commercial product on the market today to enable seamless rendering with major 3D applications in the Amazon® EC2 Cloud.

According to EnFuzion, it can supports major applications including Autodesk products, Adobe products vRay etc.

For more information read "EnFuzion3D 2009 Enables Resizable Image Rendering in the Amazon Cloud"

Cloud is In!