System X node loan After visiting System X, rather than have me monkeying around with the running supercomputer I have been loaned two nodes to work on. I have one with Mac OSX and one with Linux which is perfect for my research. My nodes are Apple Xserve G5s with dual 2.3 GHz PowerPC 970FX [...]

Visiting System X I have been over to the Advanced Research Building to talk to people about getting access to System X for research purposes. In 2004 System X was #7 in the Top 500 list. Even though it's a bit old now it is still a monster. I have definitely not seen this [...]

Recruitment day Today we have the top 20 ish domestic grad student recruits visiting the department. The SCAPE lab has fished out some posters and got the Powerpack demo running so we have something to show off. There are some students who already contacted us to talk about SCAPE, since Kirk is [...]

System G node Virginia Tech has a famous Apple supercomputer called System X. There is also a more fun to play with cluster called System G made up of 324 Mac Pros. The G stands for "green" and when it was built it was the largest power-aware research system in the world. Because Kirk [...]

http://cs.vt.edu/people Despite having been at VT since August I realised I am still not listed on the website as actually working here. Got that fixed but I look a bit like a Mitchell brother with slightly more hair.

GPU talk Yesterday I attended an interesting talk on campus. The topic was GPU trends and was given by guys from NVIDIA and Supermicro. NVIDIA pretty much said that they will bring out a GPU with a built in general purpose CPU (think ARM) which will eliminate the need for an Intel or [...]