Poked.net

The most interesting channel on TV is the weather channel. By Far.

He further questioned some of the rock's characteristics.
''Why is it so heavy?'' Oliver asked.
Ouimette said, ''Because it's a rock.''
''... It's mind-boggling,'' Oliver said of Ouimette's explanation identifying it as sandstone. ''I'm not convinced.''

So funny

Now this is an awesome photo:
Holding the sun. Found on Howling at a waning moon

Last night, I smoked a cuban. Pretty Good too.

Apparently I can now be phone paged by emailing your message to <myphonenumber>@messaging.sprintpcs.com, repace <myphonenumber> with my 10 digit cell number if you know it·

Kitten Photos

Monday, History will be made (link). The worlds first private manned space flight. They are doing a dual stage approach with an airplane lifting the rocket fairly high up before the rocket detaches and shoots into suborbital heights. With suborbital, they dont have to worry about decelerating to get out of orbit - they will come down no matter what, which makes things a bit simpler and a bit safer. I don't know about you all, but this is really exciting stuff. Its the kind of thing that makes you wonder where we as the human race will get to in my lifetime.

On another note, I'm getting a kitten soon!

For those who are interested, I have new stories about System X. I learned alot more about it today from one of the guys who helped mastermind the thing. So, my notes of interest are as follows:

- When originally designing the system, the plan was opterons with Dell and Intel working on the project, and myrinet network. The PowerPC's nor the infiniband that are now in place didnt even exist until just before the cluster was finished.
- We also had discussions with HP, Sun, and directly with Intel over bids. In fact, our guys were on the phone discussing the plans with Intel while simultaneously spec'ing the G5's on a whiteboard since we had just received the press release.
- The Infiniband network was brand new and had never been tested on something the size of our 1100 node cluster.
- The network is faster than the PCI Bus (10 Gig)
- The infiniband network can only take another 50 or so nodes given it's architecture.
- The air conditioning system has never before been tried at that scale.
- Due to certain limitations of the PowerPC architecture if you run a benchmark on the system without requiring double precision, the speed would theoretically quadruple placing VT as the #1 machine as of the last list, a good bit faster than the 35Tflop Earth Simulator!
- The #1 machine cost $350million to build. The #2 machine (about 30% faster than VT using double precision) is actually 2 computers hooked together just for this one test and cost $215 million.
- Our machine cost ~$5 million. We did not get ANY discounts from apple. We paid full educational price for the machines. The only special assistance apple offered was that we got the first machines off the assembly line. They didn't believe we'd pull it off until they actually saw the resulting number from the benchmark.
- We are planning to recover the cost over the next 5 years. The price to use the machine will be between 8 and 20 cents per node per hour.
- We are in talks with NASA for a project that would consume a total of 180 complete days of processing from our machine - to the tune of $1.4 million in NASA money.
- There are already plans to build the next VT supercomputer in 5 years. The details are hush-hush and it is tentatively named "System L/V/M", meaning it could be 50,100,or 1000 Tflops. Mmm, Pflop!
- Given that we will be aiming for top 10 again, I'm betting at least 100 Tflops.

- I have one other secret that will be known in a few days, but you have to ask me about it. Can't put it here.

My cell phone has hit rock bottom. I didn't want to change it out, but it looks like its reached the end of it's life. I can still use it, but its on the way out. Don't trust it much anymore. If anyone has a suggestion for a new one, please let me know. I'm using sprint, but am not married to them (at least not since that 2 yr agreement wore off and number portability went into effect). I'm strongly considering T-Mobile, but I don't know. I need a phone with a minimum of the following features:

1) Makes phone calls
2) Rings - like a phone - death to ringtones
3) Vibrates
4) Fits in pocket - comfortably
5) Alarm clock feature is useful.
6) Phone Book
7) VoiceMail
8) These features should be EASY to access and control. Menus are not my friend.

Tomorrow I begin a "course" on how to use System X, the third fastest supercomputer in the world. I'm such a geek, but all I can say is "yum".