Re: What he really means is...

But you're forgetting that the Keppler feature set brings a lot to the table, features/capabilities that will allow service providers to serve up games online that have performance and latency that are console-like. They probably won't be able to offer up enough performance to satisfy the hard core PC gamer, but, over time, will certainly be able to compete successfully vs. xBox, PS, and Wii on both quality and cost. And those service providers will be buying Kepplers by the boat load to make this happen.

Bewitched by trolls....

They switch street signs around the wrong way, change traffic patterns, and the like....which makes it difficult to learn your exact route right away. The only sure way to defeat their efforts is to continually chant a 'Spell of Clarity' while you're driving - which makes it hard to hear the radio.

Thank God!!Re: Crysis etc..

I went back to look at the comments on this story and I was thinking that I'd have to insert my own Crysis comment. Thank God someone else did it...

Re: Wow...great stuff

See my comment about, re: "Damn it, I wasn't using a mobile phone!"....After replying to Christian's comments above, I went back and looked at how YouTube handled the shakiness. To me, it looks like it kept doing small zooms in and out to adjust for camera motion. I know that I didn't zoom all that much and definitely didn't make the small in's and out's that seem to be on the video now. Excuses aside, I do really appreciate the feedback and will try to improve the quality.

I also appreciate your comments on the 4k class projectors. I was at another vendor event last week and they recorded the proceedings in 4k. The camera man told me that shooting in Red actually consumed 6x the storage of 1080p (I had expected it to be 4x larger) and filled his hard drive equipped camera pretty fast. But what an image!

Re: "Do you have employees who habitually bust up perfectly good tech?"

I tried that once...figured I'd get a shiny new laptop to replace the horrible clunker I was using. It sort of worked, but the ordering/delivery process took so long that I had to use a crappy loaner for several months. By the time my shiny new laptop arrived, I had taken a job at another company.

Re: Bored

Actually, it was kind of a funny moment, which is why I included it in the video you didn't watch. I also put in a few seconds of landscape time lapse footage to convey the sense of time passage. It was a tour de force of video wizardry. I'm so sorry you missed it, but I'm glad you took the time to let us know that it bored you. It's useful feedback and much appreciated.

Re: See, that's the benefit of a UK sixties education...

My US education in the seventies did cover the metric system but no one figured that we'd ever convert from F to C. The GE guys said the same thing to me as you mention above about working with low mass components. On the 'only -40C, 85C and 40G' point. These guys are building milspec hardware and I wouldn't be surprised if the public specs they disclose vary significantly from true capabilities. There could also be another line of equipment that's engineered to higher specs that they don't take to public trade shows.

Re: yo have got to be kidding

Keep your shirt on, pal. I'll be providing full coverage of ALL the teams in upcoming articles - with full motion video too. Not just the teams, but the intriguing and wonderful hardware combinations they've put together too.

Re: Footnote

I always use the US convention....so February 4th, 2012 and from everything I can see, the Chinese Astrology New Year indeed began on February 4th, 2012

Re: On the bright side...

Not sure whether it was their credit lines or not. They may have also been alerted by the exchange. Their trading had caused huge price and volume swings in some stocks and the NYSE traced it to Knight.

Exactly right

I should hit this point harder in the article(s). Knight isn't a firm that trades to make money. They aren't a hedge fund or anything like that. They don't take on much risk, they execute trades on behalf of other brokerages. They're a cog in the big financial services machine and, as 'I Ain't Spartacus' (great name, btw) put it, they make their money by being useful.

To me, this is a major reason why this story is so interesting and chilling at the same time. These guys aren't taking a lot of risk, not doing anything that's wildly or even mildly speculative - they were just testing out a new trading package. And in less than 45 minutes, an IT error almost took down their entire company to the tune of a $440 million loss. That's gotta give anyone in IT pause.

Re: FPGA's FTW

Hey Brian....I hadn't thought of FPGA's - that's a very interesting idea, but the problem might be tuning or recompiling apps to take advantage of them. I'll ask the team coaches and competition organizers about it. The winners in the SC version of the competition in Seattle were fairly GPU heavy and it paid off for them.

I'll be sure to post as much of their actual configurations as I can get my hands on. That'll probably be up on Monday or Tuesday.

Re: Seriously, nobody gets that joke

Are you talking about the headline of the article? If you are, you're not alone - I didn't get the joke either. What's sad is that I wrote the damned article...lol. I'd hope that I'd get whatever joke they use for the headline. While I've watched a lot of Brit TV here in America - I guess I haven't watched enough or watched it closely enough.

Re: I was just about to get my Caps Lock ready

These university cluster contests SHOULD be like football for techies. They have all of the required elements - competition, human interest, plus plenty of hardware and software. There's even some drinking too...what's not to like?

Glad I can help

I know what you mean, Stuart, I've been using the internet for around 18 years and I still get thrown by that stuff too - which is why I include explicit instructions from time to time. I'm glad you appreciate it - no need to thank me.

Re: Alpine hats?!?!?

You can easily drive to mountains from Karlsruhe in less than a day, don't you think? Besides, an Alpine hat isn't just for mountaineering anymore - they're a fashion statement that adds just the right stylish touch to any outfit. In fact, the couture houses are currently adding lines of Alpine hats for their next winter collections. Wait and see, the Alpine hat wil soon be the newest 'must have' accessory. I'm already on the bandwagon and am getting lots of attention for it over here....

"All going well..." and "Not the best of boasts" Really?

So how many software companies have you founded and built to the point where they employ more than 50,000 people plus earn more than $17 billion in revenue and more than $4 billion in profits? Moreover, they've been successful for 40 years. Is that such a bad thing or something to be ashamed of?

Re: I wonder

I'll be writing some articles about this competition in Hamburg and will post all of the configs as soon as I get them along with interviews and updates....stay tuned.

Re: Words...

Nice one! Had to google 'cromulent' to see if I remember correctly where I first heard it. Yep, it was The Simpsons. Great reference, cracked me up...thanks for that! I'm going to file it away for later use.

Yes, I agree with what you're saying...but....I think that much of the success will be based on how they price it. If they get the pricing right, it will carve off a chunk of casual gamers. But if it's the actual broadband suppliers who host and run the service, they'll have plenty of pricing flexibility. If the per-minute fees are low enough, it'll be kind of like the insidious app market - where some people (few) actually spend less, but most tend to pay more over time - but in tiny bits, but getting much more convenience out of it.

Regardless, this isn't aimed at the devoted gamer - at least not initially. It'll make inroads with more casual gamers first.

Re: Meh

Good points on the latency and bandwidth issues. One of the presenters from GaiKai (a hopefull online game provider) said that when he pitches service providers (like Comcast, Verizon, AT&T in the US), he always asks them "so how much money do you make when customers play with their xBox or PS3 systems?" The answer is, of course, zero. And that's the key. This could give those providers the ability to provide a fast, high bandwidth gaming solution to their customers. If they price it right, it could go a long ways towards keeping people on the cable box and stopping them from going entirely to the net for their in-home entertainment.

Re: Sir

There was another slide in the presentation that might clear this up. I'll describe it (briefly) here: Starting at the data center, it shows a latency of 60 ms for four frames processed. Then an additional 30 ms latency (for two frames) labled as the "IP Network". Then client latency of 30-60 ms for these same two frames. Summing it up, there's a total of between 120-150 ms total latency in the chain.

So the chart in the article does include internet latency - not just client and server numbers. Hope that helps clear this up....

Re: "Put them on the game grid"

Damn it!!! I hate it when I miss something obvious like that!

Re: "Average human response time"

You could well be right...but, then again, science has never studied my reaction times...which can be measured using a sun dial.

Player mods?

That's a point that I didn't consider and it's a good one. There isn't much room in this new model for players to get their hands on code and make modifications - at least initially. However, consider this - down the road, why wouldn't (or couldn't) the service provider and game designer give players a mechanism where they can mod code and then play it? They might want to get more $$ from it, of course, or maybe it could be that it's a competitive advantage for them to do it. It's possible - but probably won't happen right out of the gate....unfortunately....

Re: Critical Path

Good point about the LAN/WAN considerations. There wasn't an opportunity during the event to grill them about the specifics of the connection, although I agree that they're the key. From what I understood, the game was hosted on Gaikai servers located somewhere in the valley.

I think you're right, that this is definitely a game changer for render farms and probably for enterprise IT as well. It might also be a substitute for some portion of the game console market too. Time will tell...

Re: Cue four yorkshiremen...

Did I say I had a disk drive? It wasn't all that fancy. I had to spin it myself with a foot powered petal to keep it moving. And if I spun it too slow or too fast, it would screw up the read or write and I'd have to start over. I used to dream of having a reliable disk drive or even a cassette tape drive that worked.

Of course, I didn't get much time for computing....in the morning we'd have to get up, clean the bag, and then sweep the road clean with our tongues...

Re: Not bad mouthing the i7...

Loved the Springsteen reference - know the song well - always thought of it as "Thunder Road II: reality sets in"

I am going to do some overclocking with Hydra, but not sure to what degree. The water cooling is working great - system very cool under load, and I have gear that will overclock well. So I'll dip my toe into the overclocking waters and see how it goes. Thanks for the encouragement, it's much appreciated....

Re: Modern desktops are excellent...

What I was alluding with the Windows 7 comments in the article is that I had a full-on general purpose operating system running while I was pushing the hw with this massive benchmark. It wasn't taking up a huge portion of compute cycles - but it was taking up some of them. If I had gone whole-hog and installed the most stripped down Linux o/s I could, then it would free up more cycles for Linpack. From what I've heard from professionals in the industry, it would also give me more knobs and sliders to play with to optimize the o/s to run the benchmark.

Re: K machine - pricey?

You've hit on probably THE key question in HPC (at least for the vendors). I don't have the answers - but I think I'll write a short blog to raise the question...thanks for that!

Re: The power of an 80's super computer....

My first computer was a Sanyo MBC-550....which was billed as 80% IBM compatible. Meaning that a program would get 80% of the way loaded until it crashed. And you had 1MB of memory?!! I only had 128k RAM - and a single floppy - couldn't afford the dual floppies...and YOU'RE complaining about long processing times? lol lol

Re: Hyrda

First, if I had bought Hydra from a workstation vendor, I'm betting the all-in cost would be closer to $12,000. I'll check that out, I'm curious now. Second, I didn't actually spend that amount of money on that system. I'm very lucky in that I work in the industry and can get engineering samples and reviewer samples of some products every once in a while. For this system, a very helpful HPC vendor helped me get the Xeon processors and NVIDIA gave me two evaluation video cards. That helped defray the overall cost of the system considerably - phew....There will be more details on this when I start publishing the Hydra blogs...

Re: Accuracy of results

Yeah, you're right, my results are only grossly comparable to 'real' Linpack run by professionals. There are many reasons, here are a few major ones: 1) I'm running an abbreviated Linpack on Windows - if I were doing this as a serious exercise, I'd be running it on as stripped down a version of Linux as possible.... 2) I'm not tuning the system or the benchmark at all. I should have run many many iterations of Linpack with different problem set and array sizes to see exactly which config gives a bigger number....3) Theoretical max on Linpack is "cores" x "frequency" x "FP operations per cycle". There are ways to tune each of those factors, none of which I did.

I think I probably got to about half of the Linpack potential on the big machine - maybe a bit better on the smaller ones.