It’s been a cold, but eventful week up here in Portland, so here’s the News with Snark for Friday, Feb. 25, 2011:
- Things that make you go, Boom! Iran doubles-down with not one, but two in-country supercomputers with components purchased from the black market.
- DTrace your file system. From their soon-to-be-published book: DTrace: Dynamic Tracing in Oracle Solaris, Mac OS X and FreeBSD, authors Brendan Gregg and Jim Mauro have posted Chapter 5 on File Systems as a free download.
- Putting in the hours. In an effort to make genome sequencing affordable and available in every hospital, NCSA researchers are using 10 Million CPU hours of donated time on Jaguar to help identify the DNA sequences at single-nucleotide resolution.
- Uncheap at any speed. Less than a year after 100-Gigabit Ethernet was standardized, an industry group is looking at specs that might make the high-speed technology less expensive and more useful.
- One impressive interconnect! Stephen Foskett writes that Apple’s newly announced Thunderbolt connector is capable of providing two full-duplex channels, each providing 10 Gbps of bi-directional bandwidth, or 20 Gb/s of throughput in each direction. Add in DisplayPort’s two v1.1a connections with 8.64 Gb/s each and this yields a grand total of 57 Gb/s over a slim copper wire!
- This one goes to 11. Dan Reed writes about computing as an intellectual amplifier.
- The Sound of Silence continues from Oracle as the Lustre community moves toward releasing what some are calling a spork of Lustre 2.1. In related news, Oracle continues to lose server share with no apparent Bridge over Troubled Water.
- Zeta Flash. Constantin Gonzalez has posted an interesting FAQ on Flash Memory (SSDs) and ZFS.
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