The annual Northwest pilgrimage for the Linux faithful to the Bellingham Technical College in Bellingham, WA is nearly upon us! Puget Systems is donating a great machine to the raffle, a Serenity mini with a commemorative case etching!
NVIDIA HPC future directions
Where is NVIDIA heading with High Performance Computing hardware? Ever since Intel announced Xeon Phi Knights Landing as a stand-alone processor integrated at the board level as a full compute unit, I’ve been wondering what NVIDIA would do along these lines. It just makes sense that they would do something similar since getting the GPU off of the PCIe bus and tightly integrated with plentiful system memory would be a huge step forward for usability and performance. Here’s my guess about where NVIDIA is heading.
GTC 2014 Brief Recap — content links
I had the pleasure of attending the NVIDIA Graphics Technology Conference ( GTC ) last week. Wonderful conference! If you have any doubts about the quality of the conference you are in luck. They have most of the content on-line, you can check it out yourself …
The Continual Rise of the SSD
Just over a year ago I wrote how Solid State Drives (SSD) were soaring in popularity. At that time we offered a number of SSD models from Intel. But due to production constraints, we were on the verge of adding a few Samsung SSDs to the mix. Around this same time we began fielding a number of requests for Samsung SSDs.
Once considered a luxury item, SSDs have moved into the mainstream within the past two years. Our customers tend to be tech savvy and performance demanding to the core. So I wasn’t surprised to find widescale adoption of SSDs as I dove into the sales data.
VMware User Group Conference
I spent yesterday attending the Seattle stop of the VMware User Group (VMUG) Conference. It was a totally worthwhile event for catching up with all that is going on in the VMware world. If you didn’t already know Puget Systems has been a VMware Partner for quite some time now, we even use a number of their products to run Puget Systems.
Traffic: Puget Systems vs. Netmarketshare
We thought it would be fun to compare a few of the statistics gathered by Netmarketshare to those we track through Google Analytics for visitors to Puget Systems.
According to Netmarketshare, they are the standard in tracking technology usage market share. They have been collecting and analysing data since 1999 and, while not without controversy, are highly regarded in their approach to ranking the most popular operating systems and web browsers.
My first few weeks with Linux
I posted a few weeks ago regarding my move to Linux. I received some great feedback from our readers, and encouragement to continue posting about my experiences. If there is something specific about the Linux experience you would like me to discuss, feel free to email me at [email protected]. Hopefully, you will find these posts helpful.
Two weeks have passed since I walked away from Windows and a couple of things have really struck me in that time.
What Our Customers Have to Say About Windows 8
Windows 8 has been out for about a year and a half now, and it is common knowledge that Microsoft’s newest operating system has received mixed reactions. The new start screen (I still have to stop myself from calling it Metro!) is a jolting departure from the user interface that Windows users have been accustomed to using since 1995. One unique thing we do here at Puget Systems, is we reach out to nearly all of our customers after they have had a chance to use their new PC. We ask them how it is working for them, and what we could have done better. We learn a LOT. So, what do our customers have to say about Windows 8, and what is Puget Systems doing to respond?
Qualification: LSI 9341-8i & 9361-8i RAID Controllers
At Puget Systems, we’ve been using LSI RAID cards for a number of years now and have always been very happy with the quality of both the controllers and the MegaRAID software. The new 9361-8i and 9341-8i RAID controllers from LSI continue in their predecessor’s footsteps but add PCI-E 3.0 support and the new mini-SAS HD SFF8643 12GB/s connector.
Compute Performance: Ivy Bridge-E vs. Haswell
How does the Ivy Bridge-E Core i7-4960X (Extreme edition) do against the Haswell Core i7-4770 running the Linpack benchmark? The Ivy Bridge-E 4960X is a great processor — 6 cores, 4GHz max turbo clock, 4 memory channels, 40 PCIe lanes, big price tag … However, the humble Haswell 4770 has it’s AVX2 and FMA3 secret weapons which are really effective on linear/matrix algebra type of numerical computing problems. …
