I realize not many of you read this rather inactive journal, but...

On my blog I have a post up that attracting some interest wrt the Permian Extinction.

If you care to meander over and look, be my guest.

Cray Inc. (NASDAQ: CRAY) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science announced today that Cray has won the contract to install a next-generation supercomputer at the DOE's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC). The systems and multi-year services contract, valued at over $52 million, includes delivery of a Cray massively parallel processor supercomputer, code-named "Hood."

The contract also provides options for future upgrades that would quadruple the size of the system and eventually boost performance to one petaflops (1,000 trillion floating point operations per second) and beyond.

A successor to the massively parallel Cray XT3(TM) supercomputer, the Hood system installed at NERSC will be among the world's fastest general-purpose systems. It will deliver sustained performance of at least 16 trillion calculations per second -- with a theoretical peak speed of 100 trillion calculations per second -- when running a suite of diverse scientific applications at scale. The system uses thousands of AMD Opteron(TM) processors running tuned, light-weight operating system kernels and interfaced to Cray's unique SeaStar(TM) network.

Cray will begin shipping the new supercomputer to the NERSC facility at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory later this year, with completion of the installation anticipated in the first half of 2007 and acceptance in mid-2007.

Read about it here.

My journal writing/blogging has moved to here.

/. has lost a lot of my interest after getting annointed in the world of HPC. So much of what people say here is just plain wrong.

tschuss

Senator Barbara Boxer is giving away free money to candidates that are challenging incumbents. The catch is that you have to vote for who you want the money to go to. Pete Ashdown is not only running to unseat Senator Hatch (enemy of geeks everywhere) but is tech savvy himself, given that he is the founder of Utah's oldest ISP. His positions on tech issues should be of interest to many a slashdotter. So if you have a moment, click on the link below and vote for him to get some free money.

Vote for Pete Ashdown.

Every time CleanFlicks or similar services/technologies come up on /. there is a decided bias against them by the submitters, editors, and commenters. They're all missing the bigger picture! As I said in the most recent article:

This is a win for big copyright and a loss for free culture. /.ers are only seeing censorship here when they should be seeing remixing and control of content that you've bought. /. has consistently been on the wrong side of this issue because of a lack of vision about what it represents. How /. can champion Free DVD software for Linux so that you can watch a movie on the OS of your choice but not favor this is a mystery to me. What if that Free player knew how to skip the booring bits (Jar Jar?) or replay the naughty bits in slow mo while leaving the original media untouched? All the /.ers would be lining up behind it! But if someone uses technology for a purpose that is seen as socially conservative all the idiots here go bonkers. Your fear of "censorship" has blinded you to a corporate power grab of your culture.

Can someone out there in journal land explain to me why so many here at /. take the corporate/anti-free stance on this?

I am a bad man to show you all this and the reaction.

I hear that damned song all teh time on my wife's radio station, but that's gotta be the best use for it yet.

The sombre picture outlined above should dispel once and for all the romantic idea of the superior ecological wisdom of nonWestern and pre-colonial societies. The notion of the noble savage living in harmony with Nature should be despatched to the realm of mythology where it belongs. Human beings have never lived in harmony with nature.

From page 199.

There's a guy with a really cool interactive map that allows you to set the depth of the sea rise from global warming. I selected California as the kick-off point for the link (since that's where I am) and a depth of 9m since that's what the climate folks keep talking about around where I work. I only wish that he'd put a depth of up to 35 m. That's the Pliocene depth and very close to what the coming temeprature regime would be after a century or two. It'd be helpful for writing.

Average Olympic Athlete.

I don't look so German anymore!

You can see the bands of different cultural groups though (Mediterreanian, Germanic, and Slavic). Very interesting.

I have considered this at length. Having had this account for many years, and occasionally posted drunkenly, and sarcastically, and trollishly, I think it might be about time for me to move on to a new, clean account and sever all ties with this one. I shall bid my anonymous crazyphilman identity farewell, and let it fade into obscurity.

Consider this a sort of account suicide, while I move on to fresher pastures and start anew.

The first one is Megatokyo. It's effectively a manga written by an American. It has some rather interesting characters even if the plot doesn't seem to move very fast.

The second is The Order of the Stick. This is an absolute must if you were ever a D&D player. It's so fscking hilarious.

...You really ought to read this. Working in Berkeley and Oakland has made me believe a lot of what he's said.

Normally Phil pisses me off. However his comments there match reality in the Bay so well, this link has to be put up.

Look here and plug-in NERSC for the division search. There is one listed opening for the sysadmin section, but there are really going to be two or more.

I have now entered WalMart three times in my life.

Before I go on I should mention that I really don't have time to be shopping today. I am moving today and tomorrow. I have other things to do.

Yet I was a WalMart today at 4:10 am. The prospect of a $378 laptop was too much to resist. There were about a hundred people in line in front of me. Assuming that they didn't all want a laptop I figured that I would be ok.

Wrong.

First, the line got mysteriously thicker as time went on. There were easily 300 people in front of me when the doors opened at 5:00 am. This does not include the people that stood in the parking lot and simply sprinted at the door when it opened. What kind of jerk do you have to be to do that?

Second, they put the laptops in the grocery area. At least this is what I was told. I never saw a laptop box. I went to the electronics area which was a mob scene but lacked laptops for some reason. According to a helpful WalMart employee, the laptops were gone from the grocery area before I got into the store anyhow.

Now if you claim to be selling a sub-$400 laptop but can't/won't sell anywhere near as many as people want then you really aren't selling such laptops. You are simply claiming to. Maybe if they offered rainchecks I would believe them, but they don't and thus I am convinced that it is a scam. Classic bait and switch.

I walked out of WalMart at 5:10 am vowing to never return. Unless they will give me a raincheck, which isn't going to happen.

Read the pressy thing here.

Getting this machine through acceptance sucked Korean century old eggs. We had to change cluster file systems (an fs that eats user data is baaaaad), found bugs in AMD chipsets, had freakin weird project management from the vendor, and worse.