Windows server 2008 R2 dropped 32-bit x86 support, actually.

I wouldn't be so sure. Like previous incarnations of the Xeon MP series, this one will be much more expensive per FLOP than the 2 sockets-per-node machines that make up most x86 entries in the top500 list.

Anyway, for these big machines parallel scalability is mostly determined by the internode network, merely stuffing more cores per node does nothing. Or actually, if you don't increase network performance as you make the nodes fatter, parallel scalability will worsen as you have more cores sharing the network link.

Now, one interesting entry that will use these Nehalem-EX chips is the Altix UV by SGI. That will certainly big a very interesting architecture for people looking at big CC-NUMA machines, but as it tops out at 256 sockets in a CC-NUMA configuration it won't get anywhere near the top of the top500 list. Of course, you can cluser together several such machines if your wallet is thick enough, but at that point you lose the global CC-NUMA and a more traditional cluster is more cost effective for MPI jobs.

"Why's that guy stealing on the tv?" and you explain that stealing is wrong and he'll eventually be punished for it.

Oh. I thought the lesson was "Son, if you kill the whore afterwards you'll get your money back. And oh yeah, use the baseball bat so you'll save the bullets for when you're in trouble.".

GTA parenting FTW.

Presumably the parent meant bibtex, not bibtxt.

Actually, no. ASCI Red was retired from service in 2005.

I think the difference in speed you are referring to is that the Russian seat is measured in kilometers and the US seat is in Knots. The Russian design is rated to about 1400kph, while the US design is 600 knots. If you do the simple math, that doesn't make them equal, until you realize that 600 knots is much much faster at altitude (because of air density,) where kilometers is a fixed distance. 600 knots at sea level is about ~1100kph, but at 35,000 feet, it is ~1400kph.

Eh, what? A knot, per definition, is nautical miles per hour. The length of a nautical mile, again per definition, is 1852 meters, regardless of altitude.

Now, while I don't know about ejection seat specifications, it certainly sounds reasonably that the operating envelope would be given in terms of indicated air speed, rather than true air speed. But this is a different issue than whether the speed is given in units of knots or kph.

While I'm a Linux user myself, I also happened to stumble upon this while surfing a few months ago. IIRC based on some blog and mailing list posts I read at the time, the fundamental problem with soft updates on NetBSD (or soft dependencies, softdeps as they call it) was that they could never get the code stable enough for production usage.

Or to put it another way, soft updates work on FreeBSD because McKusick himself maintains the code. :)

I believe GFS uses a local fs on each node to take care of, well, all the stuff that a normal local fs like ext3 does. GFS only does the distributed stuff on top of that.

Oh man, wave of a lifetime.

Some observations from my brief experience

Updating in general went completely pain-free. Well, except for the servers time-outing when I tried to update on the day of the release, so I had to postpone one day.

Regressions:

Audio occasionally pops; due to some power saving stuff, solution: comment out a single line: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-discuss/2009-May/008239.html

Fonts were ugly in the beginning, turned out to be due to an old ~/.Xresources I had lying around that made my apps use the old X core fonts instead of fontconfig. No idea why it previously worked fine on 9.04. But nothing I can blame ubuntu devs on really.

Bugs:

The new perf tool coming with the 2.6.31+ kernels is missing: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/428159

Some OpenGL apps such as google earth flicker when using a compositing desktop. This is apparently a fundamental problem with the existing DRI architecture. Solution is to switch to DRI2, whenever that is ready. Again, not Ubuntu's fault really.

Improvements:

KDE 4.3.x instead of 4.2.x. Boatloads of improvements and bugfixes. And of course, also other updated apps, such as firefox 3.5, emacs 23.1 etc.

Open source radeon drivers can run OpenGL stuff with my X1550 without crashing (9.04 hard locked the machine within minutes).

My father also made a temperature controller for his house, controlling the hot/cold mixer before the water is pumped through the radiators. Inputs were inside temp, outside temp, and boiler temp. But this was all done with analog electronics, recycled from all kinds of crap that fills up his garage.

Personally, I'd have done it with an AVR or maybe even a small embedded Linux system (a suitable excuse to tinker, if nothing else). But hey, it works, so who am I to complain. Took a lot of tweaking before it worked properly though.

.. and certainly others too. Lots of exciting hardware available.

Cray has something like this in the XT series. Each cabinet has a single big fan at the bottom, sucking in air from below the raised floor and pushing it vertically through the system. And since there are no hard drives either, that fan is the only moving part in the entire cabinet.

I think newer versions also have liquid cooling in addition to the big fan. Basically something like a car radiator at the top of the cabinet.

Nothing.

Can Sun/SPARC keep ahead of them? They might only be ahead in SSL/TLS. And if that becomes a big enough demand, some taiwanese/chinese company start producing cheap pcie cards to do that

Crypto accelerator cards have been available for a long time. Don't know about the price though.

Or Intel could decide to use some transistors to do it - they have lots of transistors to play with on their chips, it's just a matter of priorities.

See "Sandy bridge", Intel's next 32nm chip, due Q1 2011, will have extra instructions for AES.