Posts by HPCJohn 215 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Sep 2014
I worked at Guys Hospital in London yea many years ago. In medical imaging and (then) high bandwidth networking.
We had a research group from the medical school decanted into offices in a tower block acrosss the street (Weston Street).
A laser link pointing out a window was set up to connect their LAN.
One London day was foggy.... sure enough we watched as the fog grew in depth , gradually creeping up the building.. till it reached the laser. No more connection!
Errr... why not put the GPU data centres in Scotland? Data centres in Nordic countries such as Iceland and Norway are very successful.
Lumi, the 5th most powerful supercomputer, is in a paper mill in Finland.
There were aluminium smelters in Scotland which used abundant hydro power.
This is a blade based system (I managed several of the previous generation ICE systems). The motherboards are Supermicro.
If 1% of the blades have ECC errors what you do is take them out of service and cannablise them for spares.
OK, your number of available blades/cores slowly decreases but you should be prepared for that.
The issue with the quick connects is more disturbing. The hoses resemble thick washing machine hoses, with sping ball valves on the end.
I guess the issue is with these ball valves.
"machine with no lower case, sound or graphics doesn't look like much"
I have a TRS80 Model 1 which may be one of the few to have lower case.
How come? The character generator can generate lower case characters. However the memory was seven ships wide.
You solder an 8th chip on 'piggy back' to an onboard memory chip then bend the addresss pin up and solder it to the correct trace.
Viola - lower case TRS80
As for sound you hook a speaker up to the Cassette Put plug and pulse that to make sounds.
I worked as a contractor at ASML and yes there are tax breaks to attract highly qualified workers.
The region also positively encourages high tech workers to move to there.
I was offered a permanent job and turned it down.. damn stupid decision.
With Brexit I don;t know how hard it would be to contract in NL now - at the time I just hopped on a Ryanair flight and turned up for work on a Monday.
Well CERN's charter forbids any military related research. It was set up in the aftermath of WWII to bring nations together.
"spurious but vaguely possible way high energy physics has a defence use " Errrr... wh exactly worked on the Manhattan Project and the other nations efforts?
Talking about solar cells on a roof to generate power.. Blackfriars rail station in London was refurbished to have entrances either side of the river Thames.
The new roof is covered in solar cells. The power they generate powers the lights for the station. All well and good of course.
But 100 ton trains need a good deal more power than that. I would expect the same thing for data centres. You might be able to power the lights and staff areas, but not racks of servers using roof mounted solar cells.
I was a gradduate student in the Glasgow High Energy Physics group. The group had an IBM mainframe - I think a 380, this was later upgraded to a 3090.
We got an ethernet gateway for the mainframe. This was delivered - an IBM PC which had both a channel adapter card (the big grey cables) and an ethernet card.
The ethernet card connected using an AUI (>) to the group thickwire ethernet which as I recall was up in the false ceiling.
All thjis in a building where Lord Kelcin lectured.
Talking about the effect of magnetic fields.. I worked on a CERN experiment at the LEP collider. The experiment had a 1.5 Tesla magnet which you could stand inside.
In the counting rooms in the experimental pit all the computer monitors had displays tilted at a crazy angle - so you had to tilt your head to the side to read them.
Those were the days of CRT terminals, VT220 usually as the experiment used VAXen of many flavours.
Me, I had a Falco terminal in my office which was a VT220 emulator AND toggled to Tektronix emulation for graphics display. There's fancy now.
Indeed. "make it easier for highly skilled workers to come to the U" Well incentives were one of the reasons I went to work in the semiconductor industry - for ASML in Eindhoven.
The Dutch have the 30% rule for tax on highly skilled workers.
The Eindhoven region also actively encourages high tech workers to come and visit there.
Sadly I now live back in Blightly with 10% inflation.
Having worked at ASML in Eindhoven, I feel that I am qualified to make some responses here.
NL offers tax incentives to highly qualified staff to move there.
The Eindhoven region actively promotes itself as a high tech region which has lots of companies and startups
The towns in the surrounding area actively promote themselves as places to live for foreign workers. Can you imagine a town in Surrey organising a coach tour for foreigners asking them to coma and live in this lovely town?
As a fresh young engineer I was our on site at Liverpool University. Back in those days Myrinet switches exhausted to the side.. so we cut holes in the side of the rack.
In this case I remember having to use a hacksaw to cut a large bolt to length... in the machine room. I was spotted doing this and dragged out of the room by the machine room manager....
Dont cut metal in a machine room.... lovely swarf and filings don't do the servers any good.
Well, my war story is about serial connections. Now IT Can Be Told (TM). When working for a leading effects/animation house in Soho we had some very tasty SGI systems for effects. One was a state of the art SGI 3000 systems, running some important software and costing $$$. One day I decided I needed a serial console on this machine.
Merrily fetch an RS@#@ cable and plug my laptop into the serial port.. then... sound of running feet as many engineers rush into the machine room. What the fsck is going on? The effects machine is down.
Turns out there was some process started at boot time which hung onto the serial port - the act of actually connecting something to the serial port brought the system down.
I don't think I ever figured out what process this was.
I had a similar teletype hooked up to my TRS-80
Bought teletype from local GPO telephone exchange surplus , fo ra fiver or a tenner.
It still had the address of the hotel it worked in hard wired in.
Same electrical setup - cassette output port connected to a mighty big transformer to drive the teletype circuitry.
Sadly the teletype went to the dump many years ago.
Sorry to answer so late. My father worked in a Glasgow University research unit in the 70s which was doing what we would now call deep learning in medicine. They used a PDP 11 (!!!). The unit studied gastrointestinal diseases. They built an easy to use terminal with yes/no style buttons as people then would have been scared off by a keyboard. They found that people answered a computer more truthfully about embarrassing GI symptoms.
OF COURSE the computer system was never used to deliver a diagnosis to the patient.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Robin-Knill-Jones/publication/3592410_Evaluation_of_a_statistical_diagnostic_system_GLADYS/links/56a2752d08aef91c8c0ef61f/Evaluation-of-a-statistical-diagnostic-system-GLADYS.pdf
My father worked in a research unit in Gastrointestinal medicine in Glasgow. They were pioneers before their time in what we now call expert systems as applied to medicine. They found that people would be more open and honest in giving answers to GI symptoms when asked by computer.
HE tole me that when foreign doctors (read English too) came to Glasgow they had to be given language coaching 'A huv the dry boak doctor'
I managed several SGI Itanium systems. They were very good for CFD work.
True tale - when a blade had to be replaced on an Altix, the SGI engineer had to phone a number in the States and get a unique code. Else the blade would not join the system.
Preventing $COUNTRY fro assembling a supercomputer by buying spare parts.
The keyboard and mouse devices appear as USB devices.
SO the cute thing is that you can lock out unknown USB devices - such as USB drives - at the hardware level. Your remote workstation never 'sees' them at all.
For hardware PCOIP you have a daughter card power from the host workstation, and appears on the bus as a USB device for keyboard/mouse.
The graphics card output is looped into the PCOIP card and there is an onboard processor which does the conversion to a network stream. The card has its own ethernet connector.
Teradici PCOIP is fantastic - I have deployed it. RDP is of course adequate for desktop use. But if you are doing high end graphics and 3D then PCOIP is what you need. I gather it uses adaptive compression - different compression depending on the type of movement on the screen.
PCOIP Also 'builds to lossless' - so on restricted bandwidth when you stop moving or rotating you will get a lossless image.
PCOIP is also entirely secure - certified to UK Govt standards.
My mother was a trained typist. Yes indeed with early computers she would use lower case L and letter O
When I got a TRS-80 Model 1 for Christmas she set it up on a special shock absorbing typists mat. Then sat if front of it in the proper position, wrists cocked.
She then proceeded to pound the hell out of it. You could actually see the case bend.
Typists in those days were STRONG.
Itanium was a great architecture for CFD work and meshing.
Not only HP machines - SGI Altix were constructed from Itanium processors. NUMA machines which could address huge amounts of memory.
When a blade was replaced in an SGI Altic, when the machine was rebooted the blade would join the system.
Of course there were export control regulations - Uncle Sam did not want $nation to make supercomputers by buying up spare blades..
So when a blade was replaced the SGI engineer had to phone up a number in the USA and be given a code number to type in at boot time.
Or the blade would not be recognised.
My mother was a shorthand typist. I got a TRS-80 as a Christmas present. We introduced my mother to the machine.
She set it up on a special heavy rubber pad - such things were used to support typewriters and you are about to know why.
She sat in a proper position, hands poised above the keyboard...
Then proceeded to POUND THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS out of it. I saw the case flex under the onslaught.
typists were trained to operate mechanical devices which needed a lot of force...
Also she would use the letter l key for the digit 1 - I think typewriters lacked a digit 1 key as you could work out the sense from context.
Also she was an audio typist who used a foot pedal. Never used the mouse with her foot though - she was a smart lady!
We have Hyperoptic in the apartment building where I live. they are excellent.
There is a half rack of kit in the underground car park and Cat5 out to each apartment.
I believe they use Openrach for FTTP - so what is this price hike going to mean for Hyperoptic customers? I guess we will end up paying more.
Magnetised monitors? You've never been to CERN then have you? Back in the days of CRT monitors I worked underground in one of the CERN experiments. We had a 1.5 Tesla magnet which you could walk into. We just had to tilt otu heads to the side to read the text on the CRTs...
Now it can be told.. I worked in a frather famous Soho effects and animation house. One of our very expensive effects suites had clients in payung $$$. The suite was run by a $$$ SGI Origin 2000 machine with fancy graphics pipelines.
Cue me in the machine room, needing a serial terminal to log in. I start a serial terminal ont he laptop and plug into an RS-232 port on the SGI Origin. Which promptly reboots.
Cue sound of running feet and the server room door bursting open...
Turns out there was a process sitting waiting on that RS-232 port. For what I do not know.. but as soon as it received any data the machine reboots.
I shall look at that channel.
In my student days I bought a surplus BT baudot teleprinter for a fiver (or maybe a tenner). TI took two people to lift the thing. IT still had the hotel code for where it was originally stationed wired on, so would print this.
I connected it up as a printer to my TRS-80. Wish I still had it but it was huge and was binned at some point.
Never printed smut on it!
Back in the days of CRT monitors in offices I Was once warned against Christmas tinsel bedecking monitors.
Something about static charge being gathered by metallic tinsel.
I was also given the line that CRT monitors give you spots. The screen does get charged, which produces an image charge on your face which attracts dirt.
SO spotty IT nerds may not be that much of a cliche.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
