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Boeing was successful at breaking a part of a 787. Successful means: It broke at more than the oneandahalf-fold ever-expected maximum aerodynamic load. Anyway .... there is a video of the test and looking at engineers breaking huge things with huge tools is really cool ... Dear Boeing ... now do this with a full wing ...

(click to view)

Well, as Transitive delivers one of the foundations of IBMs PowerVM technology, i expected, that they would acquire Transitive at some point in time. Today IBM announced such a move according to this press release: IBM Announces Plans to Acquire Transitive.

The Transitive stuff allows IBM to run Linux x86 code in a Power LPAR. Okay, i don´t really know if it´s sensible idea to use an expensive Power system to virtualize a cheap x86 system. But they need something like that as Linux on Power doesn´t really have a large support by ISVs.

Just did an short look on the new Top500 list:

• Wow ...A Constellation is an own architecture type in the Top 500 list
• The are just 9 Itanium systems left in the list.
• The total sum of Gigaflop per second increased from 11705491,49 on 2415203 to 16958600,19 on 3121579 procs. Thus the yield per CPU increased from 4,85 to 5,43 Gigaflops per proc.
• By the way: Ten year ago, the list sumed up to 29367,61 gigaflops. That´s an performance increas of over 577 times in 10 years.
• When compare the actual increases with Moores law in it´s first derivation (Moore talked about transistor count, not performance), we see some interesting developments.Moores law suggests in it´s first derivation an increase in perfomance very 18 months. Over the 10,5 years period Moore´s law suggested an increase by the factor of 128. So the performance increase of the top 500 clusters was higher than Moores law suggest. The Top500 lists suggests a doubled performance in a little over 12 month instead on the long run.
• But this doubling is just correct when you look at the whole cluster. Let´s look at the CPU level and the list of 06/2007. In this list every CPU yielded 4.05 Gigaflop. The number of 06/2008 ist just increased by the factor of 1.3 in 18 month.
• Back to cluster level: In 06/2007 the TOP500 yielded 6974873 Gigaflop/second. In the following 18 months the the list showed an increase of 2.43 (as already mentioned, the total computing power of the Nov 2008 list was 16958600 GF/s)

We had an Hadoop presentation in the Emerging Technology track at CEC 2008. While it gave an good insight of the technology to the uninitiated, it left out one important thing: How to use to sell it. I talked to some colleagues, who were a little bit perplexed about the use cases in the real world.

Of course it´s a technology that found it´s birth in the web, but when you really think about it, more use cases will come into your mind. It´s about processing data with simple means.

The customers have already the resources to build a hadoop cluster. Often they have dozens of servers, not all are equally loaded. So: Startup the Fair Share Scheduler of Solaris, give the hadoop 10% of your system and 90% for it´s real application. You have already the storage for the hadoop file system. An Solaris or Linux takes 5-10 GB at max, but you have 73 to 146 GB disks in your systems. That´s perfect ...

What are matching loads for such an construct? Everybody has such loads. For example scanning for logfiles for certain patterns (think about getting situational awareness about the data from all your intrusion detection sensors around your network). Or think about optical character recognition of scanned quotes, bills and receipts. You have to do an an mass convert job (old format of your scanned paper to a new one). Let´s use already existent resources for it at first. Processing all this process data from your automated test tools. Well ... implement this process in Java or Pig and let it run on you hadoop cluster. Analysing database informations by a sequence of hadoop jobs to find patterns. And thats just the ideas i´ve got in a few mintes. And it´s really easy to write such jobs with Pig

There are really reasons to do such stuff in a distributed manner. Instead of hours you could process a multiple TB logfile within minutes by distributing the job to many nodes. And, dear colleagues, when the admins and developers of a company get more and more fluent to work with such an environment like hadoop, they doesn´t want to use the residual computing time of existing servers, they want new servers

Or to be exact: At least their sense of humor in regard of their airline. The Map application in the Swiss A340-300 is really interesting. They show some POI in their map. I remember at least: Thresher, Titanic, Empress of Ireland and the Wilhelm Gustloff. Those points mark big disasters in maritime history.

Another word for special security screeeing? A TSA massage ...

It´s called Valley of Fire for a reason ...

The CEC2008 is over since yesterday, but my flight schedule gave me the opportunity to stay an additional night in Las Vegas. I used this additional afternoon to visit the Valley of Fire. Just one word: Impressive ... no .. that´s the wrong word ... fsking awesome .... i will upload some photos when i´m home in Germany.

But now i´m really glad, that my flights will bring me back to Hamburg in not much more than 5 hours from now. I wan´t my own bed, i want my own apartment, i want an german breakfast (abaked croissant with ham is not really style). I want to ask my doc about my sinuses. I want my own timezone.

Not a good way to start the day as i´ve found a mail from Jonathan and some Google Alerts mails not much later. Sun will cut costs in the verge of a recession of the worldwide economy. eWeeks write for example in "Sun Flames 6,000 Workers in Cost-Cutting Bid":

The company says that falling demand for high-end hardware is behind its losses and forcing budget and staffing cuts. The layoffs, which will eliminate as much as 18 percent of Sun's workforce, will save the company $700 million to $800 million. The company will incur a charge of as much as $500 million as a result of the layoffs and restructuring its software division.

I don´t like this large networking receptions ... my degree of having fun is reciprocally proportional to the number of people at the event minus 2. And when you add a still active sinusitis, earache and impaired hearing to that, it´s a sure recipe for a good networking. I left the event after 5 minutes and opted for my bed. Good night everybody ....