I think I've written about this before but, just in case, here are directions to disable IPv6 on Debian. While IPv6 may be the wave of the future, for the time being is more a nuisance than anything else. {link to this entry}

Reviewing today's articles published by Inside HPC, I come across a piece on why IBM may be pulling out of the Higher Performance Computing (HPC) market altogether that includes a few interesting thoughts. As I see it, the crux of the argument is this:

In search of a larger pattern, if a pattern exists, we put these and other questions to several HPC observers. A theme that emerged is that at the high end of HPC, systems have become so compute-intensive, so specialized, complex and costly that they are increasingly less relevant and transferable to the higher volume mid-sized enterprise HPC market, never mind the mainstream data center server market. Building a system that can deliver, say, a quintillion (1018) calculations per second requires technologies and capabilities not needed for a relatively smaller cluster. Scaled-up supercomputing clusters don’t scale down, the argument goes, making extreme-scale HPC systems a bad ROI proposition.

In stark contrast, the argument continues, stands the HPC components business, a high-margin technology market for CPUs, GPUs, high performance networks, high-capacity HBM memory, high speed interconnects and other gear used in supercomputing-class systems.

Some food for thought. {link to this entry}