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Great news for Lightfleet Corporation. They are now officially completely obsolete.

Lightfleet soon to follow. How is the company that was using Transmeta chips doing?

I have been following photonics for the last 20 years, and today I came across something that seemed it needed to be slashdotted. "This development makes evident that Intel's anticipated Laser Processor is more than just a rumor."
http://ightfeet.com So are electrons obsolete yet? Guess we will have to see if this new cool optical server ships on time. My guess is that we will soon see the light;) -- R

• Wireless optical interconnects replace switches in clusters
  
• Polarized light video displays (3D in color, and it's pretty damn good, even if you do need polarized glasses) in the home
  
• DVD vendors finally concede defeat and make their products genuinely interchangeable, even when using a home recorder
  
• SCO completes the transformation into a Ringwraith and adds Frodo to the lawsuit
  
• Someone develops a completely functional computer that runs Linux and Fedora Core, using only chip specifications from Open Cores and programmable components. The computer then outsells at least one well-known PC manufacturer.
  
• SGI reaches crisis point and can't continue. It is bought by OSDL, the Altix is moved to the Opteron and Linus Torvalds sets a new record for kernel build times.
  

Vancouver in Washington State or Vancouver, Canada? If Canada, Telus has crap engineers and might well be willing to pay to have people who know what they're doing, but dunno that for sure. If Vancouver WA, then Lightfleet might well be interested - they're on the lookout for high-end developers and I can say for certain that it is going to be tough for them to find the level of skill they want. What's the worst that can happen if you ask?

The problem with latency is that everyone lies about the figures. I talked to some of the NIC manufacturers and got quoted the latency of the internal logic, NOT the latency of the card as a whole, and certainly not the latency of the card when integrated. There was one excellent-sounding NIC - until you realized that the bus wasn't native but went through a whole set of layers to be converted into the native system, and that the latency of these intermediate steps, PLUS the latencies of the pseudo-busses it went through, never figured in anywhere. You then had to add in the latency of the system's bus as well. In the end, I reckoned that you'd probably get data out at the end of the week.

I also saw at SC2005 that the architectures sucked. The University of Utah was claiming that clusters of Opterons didn't scale much beyond 2 nodes. Whaaaa???? They were either sold some VERY bad interconnects, or used some seriously crappy messaging system. Mind you, the guys at the Los Alamos stand had to build their packet collation system themselves, as the COTS solution was at least two orders of magnitude too slow.

I was impressed with the diversity at SC2005 and the inroads Open Source had made there, but I was seriously disgusted by the level of sheer primitiveness of a lot of offerings, too. Archaic versions of MPICH do not impress me. LAM might, as would LAMPI. OpenMPI (which has a lot of heavy acceleration in it) definitely would. The use of OpenDX because (apparently) OpenGL is "just too damn slow" was interesting - but if OpenDX is so damn good, why hasn't anyone maintained the code in the past three years? (I'd love to see OpenGL being given some serious competition, but that won't happen if the code is left to rot.)

Microsoft - well, their servers handed out cookies. Literally.