Phidgets are a set of “plug and play” building blocks for low cost USB sensing and control from your PC.
Patently Absurd – Forbes.com
An awkward silence ensued. The blue suits did not even confer among themselves. They just sat there, stonelike. Finally, the chief suit responded. “OK,” he said, “maybe you don’t infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk [IBM headquarters in New York] and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?”
After a modest bit of negotiation, Sun cut IBM a check, and the blue suits went to the next company on their hit list.
via Patently Absurd – Forbes.com.
Incredible. Article from 2002.
Symmetric multiprocessing
Symmetric multiprocessing – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
In computing, symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) involves a multiprocessor computer hardware architecture where two or more identical processors are connected to a single shared main memory and are controlled by a single OS instance. Most common multiprocessor systems today use an SMP architecture. In the case of multi-core processors, the SMP architecture applies to the cores, treating them as separate processors. Processors may be interconnected using buses, crossbar switches or on-chip mesh networks. The bottleneck in the scalability of SMP using buses or crossbar switches is the bandwidth and power consumption of the interconnect among the various processors, the memory, and the disk arrays. Mesh architectures avoid these bottlenecks, and provide nearly linear scalability to much higher processor counts at the sacrifice of programmability:
Debian Linux Benchmarked Against Debian GNU/kFreeBSD & FreeBSD
Windows on Mainframes Due December 16
By December 16 of this year, IBM says it plans to support Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter Edition running in a zBX chassis on its HX5 blades.
via Windows on Mainframes Due December 16 — Enterprise Systems.
Can DRAM replace hard drives and SSDs? RAMCloud creators say yes
The idea of replacing hard disk drives with flash memory has been gaining steam in the IT industry. But a research group at Stanford University is going even further: they say the goal should be to replace hard disks with DRAM.
via Can DRAM replace hard drives and SSDs? RAMCloud creators say yes.
This seems to violate the KISS principle. The comments in the above article are also interesting. RAM disks have been around since early DOS days.
Fencing and Stonith
Fencing is a very important concept in computer clusters for HA (High Availability). Unfortunately, given that fencing does not offer a visible service to users, it is often neglected.
Fencing may be defined as a method to bring an HA cluster to a known state. But, what is a “cluster state” after all? To answer that question we have to see what is in the cluster.
via Fencing and Stonith.
STONITH (Shoot The Other Node In The Head)
Stonith is our fencing implementation. It provides the node level fencing.
Gotta love how they come up with those acronyms. 🙂
Setting up IP Aliasing on A Linux Machine Mini-HOWTO
/sbin/ifconfig eth0:0 172.16.3.10
via Setting up IP Aliasing on A Linux Machine Mini-HOWTO.
Needed to set up ip aliasing. Some good other info as to how to incorporate into /etc/rc.local on that site — even though the site is over 10 years old LOL.
Japan Reclaims Top Ranking on Latest TOP500 List of World’s Supercomputers
The New Number One
The K Computer, built by Fujitsu, currently combines 68544 SPARC64 VIIIfx CPUs, each with eight cores, for a total of 548,352 cores—almost twice as many as any other system in the TOP500. The K Computer is also more powerful than the next five systems on the list combined.
Here is another article about this.
Protecting the pre-OS environment with UEFI
Quick summary
- UEFI allows firmware to implement a security policy
- Secure boot is a UEFI protocol not a Windows 8 feature
- UEFI secure boot is part of Windows 8 secured boot architecture
- Windows 8 utilizes secure boot to ensure that the pre-OS environment is secure
- Secure boot doesn’t “lock out” operating system loaders, but is a policy that allows firmware to validate authenticity of components
- OEMs have the ability to customize their firmware to meet the needs of their customers by customizing the level of certificate and policy management on their platform
- Microsoft does not mandate or control the settings on PC firmware that control or enable secured boot from any operating system other than Windows
Via Protecting the pre-OS environment with UEFI – Building Windows 8 – Site Home – MSDN Blogs.