And now the Verari website is off the air [UPDATED]
I don’t want to read too much into this, since it could be that their Apache server has just gone tits up and will be back, but following up on comments left at this site and on Twitter it is apparent that Verari’s website is indeed down. Coming as it does on the heels of a forced two week employee furlough, this is a curious sign indeed.
Of course it could just be that the employee who is in charge of the server is on furlough, making the site down a meaningless coincidence.
[UPDATE] Mike LaPan, who sports a verari.com email address and is therefore credible, has left comments saying that the site is just down. …
InsideTrack: NVIDIA Fermi Performance with CULA
Hot off the presses this morning are some real benchmarks on the latest NVIDIA Fermi gear. We’ve all heard the technical news from the latest in silicon goodies from NVIDIA, but not a whole lot with real workloads. We were tipped off this morning on a ‘hot off the presses’ blog post from the nice folks at EM Photonics. They’re in the biz packaging mathematics libraries, called CULA, geared toward the NVIDIA platform. They released some performance bits with their latest release of CULA, version 1.3a. Now that they have their release out in the wild, they focused some engineering time on beginning to port and adapt CULA to NVIDIA’s Fermi platform. They …
Inside Track: Employees at new Verari head for furlough as company struggles in recovery
It’s been a while since we wrote about Verari. You’ll recall that Verari Systems went out of business back in December and had to sell assets to pay creditors, laying off all their employees in the process. Then co-founder Dave Driggers managed to put together some financing and buy some of what was left to try and make another go of it as Verari Technologies. The company didn’t say much after it started getting systems back on line, but we assumed things were clicking along.
Evidently not.
I have been hearing via Twitter and a few other outlets (and on this site; see the more recent comments on this article) that the company is not doing well, and even …
UV login seen in the wild
During his presentation today at the Newport HPC conference Eng Lim Goh, SGI’s CTO and the brains behind SGI’s x86-based shared memory future, logged into an SGI UV and gave it a little exercise for the audience. He mentioned that it was 1,000 cores in one 2 TB shared memory space. Was good to see things are on track to start shipping in summer.
InsideTrack: SGI about to launch a new product for SMB
This morning’s RSS feed from SGI has provided what I’m assuming is an unintentional early peek at SGI’s next product. The headline in the RSS feed is
SGI Announces Origin 400 Blade System for SMB and Enterprise Markets
There isn’t an article linked to the headline, though, and no word of the product is currently on SGI’s web site. Of course Origin 400 is a decade-old product name, so this could have just been a server glitch that pulled an old article.
Except it isn’t. While I haven’t heard back from SGI officially, sources inside the company have confirmed for me that SGI is indeed launching a new product, and recycling the name (as they did with the recent Octane announcement).
SGI’s …
InsideTrack: Former employees confirm Quadrics officially out of business last week
In late May we reported on rumors at The Reg and the New York Times (here) that interconnect maker Quadrics was heading for a shutdown of operations in June. Subsequent Googling turned up a big fat zero, except that the rumors hadn’t yet been confirmed.
I started sending some emails around, and heard back from former Quadrics employees, who confirmed that four Quadrics staff transferred to Vega Ltd., another company owned by the parent of Quadrics, Finmeccanica UK. Vega acquired Quadrics’ outstanding support contracts, including the flagship Tera10 at CEA in France, and they also got the remaining Quadrics hardware stock to supply spares for existing customers. There is also some word that Vega has acquired some of the Quadrics IP, but no …
NVIDIA updates us on the Tesla shortage
As commented on by Joe Landman at his blog, Tesla C1060s that plug into desktops and workstations and form the cornerstone of the Personal Supercomputing initiative have been hard to come by so far this summer (note that this is a different unit than the rack-mountable S1070). Last year the company was announcing partnerships around the C1060 to promote the Personal Supercomputing idea, including this announcement with Cray for the CX-1, and as recently as May announced that Dell would sell the cards in their high-end products.
What hasn’t been as widely discussed is the fact that the units can be hard to come by. From Joe’s post in mid-June
If you haven’t heard, Tesla’s are
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