Posts by Dyip Blog.OCF

IBM storage crew: Why bury your BEST kit at the back of the larder?

Go GPFS GO!

You are right! It is IBM’s crown jewels hidden away and locked in the deepest darkest dungeon! IBM does have literally hundreds of thousands of customers though and we don’t always hear about them. For every SONAS or V7000U system that IBM has sold, they have GPFS in them, so unbeknown to the end user they are using GPFS!

We work in the HPC space and, as one of the commenters here rightly points out, if you’re in this market you’ll hardly ever find a cluster without GPFS [it is not always sites with multiple PetaBytes of data either, but sites with complex storage environments that require strong data management]

We have also taken GPFS to a number of customers outside of HPC to dozens of private sector organisations for example WRN, RMS, IMD, Smoke and Mirrors and Landmark Solutions. Plus, many academic institutes such as University of Edinburgh, Technium Pembrokeshire and the University of Westminster. Go GPFS Go! David Yip, OCF

Big guns turn sights on cancer-causing genes

KCL photos

A loud-hailer icon seems only right for a PR man. You can see more photos (including the genomics sequencing machines, storage, Biomedical Research Centre, etc.) from the deployment at King's College London here, http://blog.ocf.co.uk/?p=701

GPU-CPU hybrids promise the moon*

more than worth it

I do agree that only applications which are ‘embarrassingly parallel’ will run well on GPUs. However, in contrast to what many people say I don’t necessarily think the answer here is to simply ‘re-write the software’ or make it ‘GPU-riffic’ or ‘GPU-tastic’. I don’t believe it is that easy. If these codes were written in the 70s and 80s, etc, then it’s feasible that the developers will have changed roles, moved companies or are simply not in a position to help. I would argue that it requires a team of people which encompass both computation science skills but also importantly domain knowledge of the subject the code is to be used for, such as physics or chemistry. The two parts must work together; a collaborative approach is more likely to succeed. That may sound hard work and could put some IT managers off, but based on the stats in this article, it would be more than worth it.