Archive for July, 2010

High Performance Computing Clusters in the Computer Science Department, Cal Poly, SLO

Cal Poly, SLO, where I work is a teaching university.  We don’t do a lot of research and historically, there hasn’t been a lot of high performance computing on campus.  A number of years ago, Information Technology Services (ITS, the central campus computing people) got a grant and set up a small cluster for general use.  Users of this cluster that I’ve talked to weren’t very happy with it.  It wan’t particularly big, and it wasn’t particularly easy to use.  Since then, various faculty with research projects have gotten their own clusters which their departments operated, not ITS.  The first cluster I’m aware of like this was ravel.csc.calpoly.edu, which I helped spec out, buy, rack up, and loaded the operating system on.

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2010
07/17
CATEGORY
High Performance Computing and Clusters
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Beginner’s guide to iometer – real world disk benchmark

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and benchmarks statistics.” I often get asked about disk performance.  I often use iometer — a well known disk benchmark.  I usually use it on Windows.  It’s pretty easy to set up, although it does have a lot of configuration options.  I wrote up a quick guide to using iometer.  Gentlemen, start your disk controllers.

Iometer_sas1

2010
07/10
CATEGORY
Storage
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© 2009 Gregory L. Porter.

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This is *MY* blog, not my employer's. I pay for the hosting. Any opinions expressed here are my own. Your mileage may vary. Don't take the red pill. Do not meddle in the affairs of system administrators, for they are subtle and quick to anger.
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