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Re: Larrabee delayed: anyone know what's happening?

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Anne & Lynn Wheeler

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Dec 27, 2009, 1:23:55 AM12/27/09

re:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009s.html#34 Larrabee delayed: anyone know what's happening?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009s.html#35 Larrabee delayed: anyone know what's happening?

The communication group had other mechanisms besides outright
opposition. At one point the disk division had pushed thru corporate
approval for a kind of distributed envirionment product ... and the
communication group change tactics (from outright opposition) to
claiming that the communication group had corporate strategic
responsibility for selling such products. The produt then had price
increase of nearly ten times (compared to what the disk division had
been planning on sellting it for).

The other problem with the product was that the shipped mainframe
support only got about 44kbytes/sec thruput while using up a 3090
processor(/cpu). I did the enhancements that added that added RFC1044
to the product and in some tuning tests at cray research got
1mbyte/sec thruput while using only modest amount of 4341 processor
(an improvement of approx. 500 times in terms of instruction executed
per byte moved) ... turning tests were memorable in other ways ...
trip was NW flt to minneapolis left group 20 minutes late ... however
it was still wheels up out of SFO five minutes before the earthquake
hit. misc. past posts mentioning rfc1044 support
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#1044

also slightly related:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009s.html#32 Larrabee delayed: anyone know what's happening?

slight digression, mainframe product had done tcp/ip protocol stack in
vs/pascal. It had none of the common buffer related exploits that are
common in C language implementations. It wasn't that it was impossible
to make such errors in pascal ... it was that it was nearly as hard
to make such errors as it is hard not to make such errors in C. misc.
past posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#overflow

In the time-frame of doing rfc 1044 support was also getting involved
in HIPPI standards and what was to becomes FCS standards ... at the
same time as trying to figure out what to do about SLA when rs/6000
shipped. ESCON was the mainframe varient that ran 200mbits/sec ... but
got only about 17mbytes/sec aggregate thruput, minor reference:
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/htp/tpf/tpfug/tgs03/tgs03l.txt

RS/6000 SLA was tweaked to 220mibts/sec ... and was looking at
significantly better than 17mbytes/sec sustained but full-duplex, in
each direction (not aggregate, in each direction ... in large part
because it wasn't simulating half-duplex with the end-to-end synchronous
latencies).

also, while the communication group was doing things like trying to
shutdown things like client/server, as part of preserving the terminal
emulation install base ... we had come up with 3-tier architecture and
was out pitching it to customer executives (and taking more than
a few barbs from the communication group) ... misc. past post mentioning
3-tier
http://www.garlic.dom/~lynn/subnetwork.html#3tier

also these old posts with references to the (earlier) period ... with
pieces from '88 3-tier marketing pitch
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#16 middle layer
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#17 middle layer

this is reference to jan92 meeting looking at part of ha/cmp scaleup
(commercial & database as opposed to numerical intensive) & FCS
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13

where FCS is looking better than 100mbyte/sec full-duplex (i.e.
100mbyte/sec in each direction). for other drift ... some old
email more related to ha/cmp scaleup for numerical intensive and
some other national labs issues:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006x.html#3 Why so little parallelism?

now part of client/server ... two of the people mentioned in the jan92
meeting reference ... later left and show up at small client/server
startup responsible for something called "commerce server" (we had
also left in part because the ha/cmp scaleup had been transferred and
we were told we weren't to work on anything with more than four
processors) ... and we were brought in as consultants because they
wanted to do payment transactions. The startup had also invented this
technology called "SSL" that they wanted to use ... and the result is
now frequently called "electronic commerce".

Part of this "electronic commerce" thing was something called a
"payment gateway" (which we periodically claim was the original
"SOA") ... some past posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#gateway

which required a lot of availability ... taking payment transactions
from webservers potentially all over the world; for part of the
configuration we used rs/6000 ha/cmp configurations.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp

in any case ... one of the latest buzz is "cloud computing" ... which
appears trying to (at least) move all the data back into a datacenter
... with some resemblance to old-time commercial time-sharing ... for
other drift, misc. past posts mentioning (mainframe) virtual machine
based commercial time-sharing service bureaus starting in the late 60s
and going at least into the mid-80s
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#timeshare

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Anne & Lynn Wheeler

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Dec 28, 2009, 9:52:38 AM12/28/09

Carlie Coats <car...@jyarborough.com> writes:
> As one of those Fortran programmers, I think my biggest problem
> is trying to deal with external data formats designed by idiots.
> For an extreme example, have a look at the official World Meteorology
> Association standard for data interchange, GRIB. A readable starting
> point would be <http://dss.ucar.edu/docs/formats/grib/gribdoc/>.
> It has the most evil misalignment I've seen.

re:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009s.html#23 Larrabee delayed: anyone know what's happening?

some x-over between ncar (national center for atomospherric research),
at ucar (university corporation for atmospheric research), and mesa
(table mesa drive).

in the early 90s, congress passed some legislation that relaxed some
anti-trust legislation and provided for some other stuff ... that was to
promote commercial transfer of gov. technology ... with the objective of
improving US competitive position in the world. this shows up (at least)
in commercialization of various stuff from national labs ... including
various kinds of storage management; LANL ... datatree; LLNL
... unitree, and NCAR (SAN mentioned in previous post) ... Mesa
Archival.

We were actively involved in the unitree effort and also got asked to do
some stuff with the Mesa Archival effort by people at NCAR. Part of it
was the san jose disk division was investing/funding Mesa Archival
activity ... and we were asked to go by Mesa Archival to see how things
were going &/or provide help. This was somewhat to sidestep some of the
internal politics that happened with more direct activity.

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009s.html#34 Larrabee delayed: anyone know what's happening?

After we left in '92 ... we did various consulting activities ... like
the stuff for small client/server startup that is now frequently called
"electronic commerce" ... and for Steve Chen when he was CTO at Sequent.
There was also guy at LLNL that was trying to "commercialize" various
LLNL technologies ... one was trying to move some LLNL chip technology
into commercial smartcard world. Part of that was using the anti-trust
relaxation for commercial consortium and the formation of FSTC
... current FSTC (even tho there appears to be little current LLNL
activity)
http://www.fstc.org/

even the LLNL FSTC webpage at wayback machine says the page
has moved and then redirects to above URL
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.llnl.gov/fstc

Anne & Lynn Wheeler

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Dec 28, 2009, 10:35:09 AM12/28/09

Anne & Lynn Wheeler <ly...@garlic.com> writes:
> in the early 90s, congress passed some legislation that relaxed some
> anti-trust legislation and provided for some other stuff ... that was to
> promote commercial transfer of gov. technology ... with the objective of
> improving US competitive position in the world. this shows up (at least)

re:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009s.html#42 Larrabee delayed: anyone know what's happening?

part of the above was 1990 census showed marked decline in education
level (especially science & math) of citizens ... and there was various
efforts to counter the downward spiral. science&technology was becoming
major US (& world) economic driver ... and US citizens weren't keeping
up. one of the reports was that half the 18yr olds were "functionally
illiterate". Others had half of the advanced science/technology/math
degrees were going to foreigners ... and that the US economy was
increasingly being propped up by foreigners.

Charlie Gibbs

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Dec 28, 2009, 1:04:17 PM12/28/09

In article <m33a2vg...@garlic.com>, ly...@garlic.com

(Anne & Lynn Wheeler) writes:

> part of the above was 1990 census showed marked decline in education
> level (especially science & math) of citizens ... and there was
> various efforts to counter the downward spiral. science&technology
> was becoming major US (& world) economic driver ... and US citizens
> weren't keeping up. one of the reports was that half the 18yr olds
> were "functionally illiterate".

Look on the bright side - you're saving all those education dollars
so you can afford the rich bonuses for those who have run the economy
into the ground.

> Others had half of the advanced science/technology/math degrees were
> going to foreigners ... and that the US economy was increasingly being
> propped up by foreigners.

The Canadian government sees skilled immigrants as the Great White Hope.
That lets them dumb down Canadians (making them less likely to question
their grand schemes), and, again, frees up all those education dollars
for more worthy projects. There's a minor glitch in that many of these
immigrants' qualifications aren't recognized in Canada, resulting in
foreign Ph.Ds working in minimum-wage jobs - but hey, the bureaucrats
are having fun...

--
/~\ cgi...@kltpzyxm.invalid (Charlie Gibbs)
\ / I'm really at ac.dekanfrus if you read it the right way.
X Top-posted messages will probably be ignored. See RFC1855.
/ \ HTML will DEFINITELY be ignored. Join the ASCII ribbon campaign!

Peter Flass

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Dec 28, 2009, 3:08:02 PM12/28/09

Charlie Gibbs wrote:
> In article <m33a2vg...@garlic.com>, ly...@garlic.com
> (Anne & Lynn Wheeler) writes:
>
>> part of the above was 1990 census showed marked decline in education
>> level (especially science & math) of citizens ... and there was
>> various efforts to counter the downward spiral. science&technology
>> was becoming major US (& world) economic driver ... and US citizens
>> weren't keeping up. one of the reports was that half the 18yr olds
>> were "functionally illiterate".
>
> Look on the bright side - you're saving all those education dollars
> so you can afford the rich bonuses for those who have run the economy
> into the ground.

The problem is there is apparently little correlation between the money
spent on education and the results. This is hidden by the fact that the
richest school districts spend the most and have the best-performing
students, but it isn't the money that does it. The school boards and
teachers' unions keep screaming for cash, but never show real results.

Some of the brightest Americans (and Canadians) of the last 100-150
years learned in one-room schoolhouses with a single teacher, few
textbooks, no indoor plumbing, and certainly no shiny libraries, labs,
gyms, auditoriums, field trips, etc. Most students who came out of that
system had at least basic literacy and math skills, which is more than
we're getting now. What they had was a desire to learn and parents who
supported and reinforced that.

Patrick Scheible

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Dec 28, 2009, 5:11:37 PM12/28/09

Peter Flass <Peter...@Yahoo.com> writes:

Yes, to a large extent. Parents are their children's first and most
important teachers. If the parents are educated themselves and
involved in the children's education they can produce good results in
spite of ridiculously bad schools.

The question is what to do when parents are not educated themselves
and/or not supporting and reinforcing their children's education. If
the school has the resources to keep class sizes in the 15-18 student
range rather than in the 28-35 range, they can produce good results
even among students whose parents are uninvolved. But few public
schools in the U.S. have that kind of money.

-- Patrick

jmfbahciv

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Dec 29, 2009, 7:58:20 AM12/29/09

I think the key is _one_-room schoolhouse. That took care of the slow
learners and the fast learners. Now most of the education biz is
aimed at dumbing down everyone.

/BAH

Anne & Lynn Wheeler

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Dec 29, 2009, 11:18:27 AM12/29/09

jmfbahciv <jmfbahciv@aol> writes:
> I think the key is _one_-room schoolhouse. That took care of the slow
> learners and the fast learners. Now most of the education biz is
> aimed at dumbing down everyone.

re:

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009s.html#42 Larrabee delayed: anyone know what's happening?

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009s.html#43 Larrabee delayed: anyone know what's happening?

there appears to also be an ethics issue ... reports of big uptic in
cheating ... promoting culture that it is easier to cheat than to
actually do the work.

jmfbahciv

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Dec 31, 2009, 8:50:18 AM12/31/09

Anne & Lynn Wheeler wrote:
> jmfbahciv <jmfbahciv@aol> writes:
>> I think the key is _one_-room schoolhouse. That took care of the slow
>> learners and the fast learners. Now most of the education biz is
>> aimed at dumbing down everyone.
>
> re:
> http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009s.html#42 Larrabee delayed: anyone know what's happening?
> http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009s.html#43 Larrabee delayed: anyone know what's happening?
>
> there appears to also be an ethics issue ... reports of big uptic in
> cheating ... promoting culture that it is easier to cheat than to
> actually do the work.
>

Especially when the teachers teach the kids how to cheat on the
requirements' test programs.

10+ years ago, one of my nephews was told he didn't have to do any
math work (he knew all the material) instead of being given
harder problems and more work. That one of the methods of
dumbing down the kids.

/BAH

Anne & Lynn Wheeler

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Jan 4, 2010, 7:17:01 AM1/4/10

medusa was all about footprint, cooling (handling heat as more & more
was compressed into smaller area), and interconnect ... and we
were doing cluster scaleup as part of ha/cmp ... which also was
heavily into availability
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp

in fact, when I was out marketing ha/cmp, I had coined the terms
"disaster survivability" and "geographic survivability" to differentiate
from disaster/recovery
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#available

primary person behind medusa was engineer that I previously mentioned
involved with 6000 serial-link-adaptor (SLA) and then worked in FCS
committee ... recent reference:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009s.html#32 Larrabee delayed: anyone know what's happening?

misc. old medusa email &/or cluster scaleup
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#medusa

this is old email (lots of stuff about working with LLNL &/or parties
doing stuff for LLNL.) ... possibly just hrs before being told it was
being transferred and we weren't to work on anything with more than
4-processors
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006x.html#email920129

and then little over 2weeks later announcement (only for *scientific
and technical*)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001n.html#6000clusters1

and then later that summer (about the time we were leaving)
... *clusters caught us by surprise*
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001n.html#6000clusters2

other recent threads mentioning above:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009o.html#81 big iron mainframe vs. x86 servers
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009p.html#54 big iron mainframe vs. x86 servers
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009p.html#55 MasPar compiler and simulator
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009p.html#85 Anyone going to Supercomputers '09 in Portland?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009q.html#27 Supercomputers Are Still Fast, but Less Super
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009q.html#33 Check out Computer glitch to cause flight delays across U.S.

as previously mentioned ... some connection between *cluster scaleup*
and *electronic commerce* ... reference to jan92 meeting about
cluster scaleup for commercial dataprocessing
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13

two of the people in that meeting later leave and show up at small

client/server startup responsible for something called "commerce

server" and we were brought in because they wanted to do payment
transactions on the server. The "commerce server" started out as
collection of servers providing a multi-store "mall" paradigm
implemented with large oracle dbms backend. the startup had also
invented this technology called "SSL" they wanted to use.

Now before we had left ... besides ha/cmp, FCS, HIPPI and misc. other
stuff ... we also played some in SCI. Part of ha/cmp issue involved
purity of "801" and simplified hardware ... and major 801
simplification theme was no cache coherency (ruling out shared memory
multiprocessing). Since there was no cache coherency & multiprocessing
... that forced scaleup to purely interconnect solution.

While doing electronic commerce ... we also talked some to convex
about their examplar sci implementation (using HP risc chips). Then
HP acquired both Verifone (a major point-of-sale terminal vendor that
was looking at moving into the electronic commerce value chain) and
Convex ... and we spent some amount of time at HP, talking to the
respective responsible executives.

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