I did Karate for several years until I moved and couldn't find my style taught in my new location.
It's a great workout, but more than that, it's actually *engaging*, unlike endless hours on the treadmill or pounding pavement, both of which I find incredibly tedious (despite being a runner in high school).
That said, weight gain has a lot to do with diet as well. If you're curious about the biology of nutrition and how your body reacts to different foods, I'd highly recommend Taubes' "Good Calories, Bad Calories". It's a dense but very interesting read.
I mean, I see what they're trying to do. Now that Evolution has matured after years on the Linux desktop, the developers think it's ready to take on the Windows world. The problem is, the typical Windows box already *has* several crash-prone memory and CPU eating viruses, like Outlook, Office and IE. It'll be a long time until Evolution can compete with the resource hungry appetites of current Windows software. In the meantime, we'll have to be content with it only eating excessive amounts of CPU and memory on Linux boxes and satisfy ourselves with the global, albeit much smaller, groan of Evolution users worldwide as their favorite mail/calendar/VM stress test/TDP pusher crashes yet again.
OpenOffice, OTOH, is quite ready to compete with the likes of MS Office for the office suite bloatware crown.
1. Raw MHz means nothing. SGI's MIPS-based machines perform excellently, at the top of the Spec2000 benchmarks, and extensively blow away both x86 and Itanium I. There isn't enough data yet to draw any conclusions about Itanium II. I would take an Irix-based Origin system any day over the completely unproven IA64.
Huh? There's data out there, let's look at some of the SPEC results:
CPU specint specfp
600MHz R14k 483 495
800MHz Itanium 314 645
1GHz Itanium II 807 1356
So the MIPS CPU does pretty well considering its low clockspeed, but Itanium II has a much higher peak perf. When you combine that with the monstrous bandwidth of an O3K machine, you get something pretty powerful.
2. Having developed for NUMA architectures, I am confused as to why this machine is designed the way it is. Unless they've done extensive modifications to the kernel, and especially the brain-damaged Linux thread libraries, you're going to end up with what are supposed to be threads of the same process running with different memory access properties.
Linux 2.4 with the O(1) scheduler is pretty good at SMP thread scheduling, but since the latencies accross NUMAflex are so low, process and thread placement aren't as important as they would be on, say, an IBM NUMA box, which is much more 'non-uniform' wrt memory latency. The 2.5 kernel should be even more scalable, as it'll probably include a NUMA-aware scheduler.
3. Even more confusing, what little press there is on this machine claims constant data access to anywhere in the combined memory space. NUMA by definition is non-uniform memory access. What's with that?
I imagine they're referring to the fact that you don't have to use a message passing API to do your app development, i.e. all the memory of the machine is in one big address space. Of course accessing different nodes will result in varying access times, but that's obvious.
To be fair, if you don't need this machine.. don't buy it or think about it
I disagree... if you need a decent server, especially a scalable one, this machine is for you. You can start out small and add stuff as you need it.
Wanna run a database? This machine is perfect. You can add to more CPUs to the system if you need them. You can also add more I/O to the system independently, w/o changing your CPU count unless you need to. For those reasons, this machine would also be great as a general purpose server for running apps of any sort that need server class I/O and CPU power.
Wanna run some crash simulation codes? Again, this machine is perfect. You can run a threaded version or an MPI version and get tremendous performance because of the massive memory bandwidths and low latencies that this system provides.
OTOH, if you wanna run Quake or UT you should probably get a Clawhammer or one of those hyperthreaded P4s.
SGI is a dying company
This machine is the most general purpose machine that SGI has put out in a long time, due to the fact that it runs Linux on Intel. This should mean bigger markets will be available to SGI, hopefully preventing its demise.
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I did Karate for several years until I moved and couldn't find my style taught in my new location.
It's a great workout, but more than that, it's actually *engaging*, unlike endless hours on the treadmill or pounding pavement, both of which I find incredibly tedious (despite being a runner in high school).
That said, weight gain has a lot to do with diet as well. If you're curious about the biology of nutrition and how your body reacts to different foods, I'd highly recommend Taubes' "Good Calories, Bad Calories". It's a dense but very interesting read.
I mean, I see what they're trying to do. Now that Evolution has matured after years on the Linux desktop, the developers think it's ready to take on the Windows world. The problem is, the typical Windows box already *has* several crash-prone memory and CPU eating viruses, like Outlook, Office and IE. It'll be a long time until Evolution can compete with the resource hungry appetites of current Windows software. In the meantime, we'll have to be content with it only eating excessive amounts of CPU and memory on Linux boxes and satisfy ourselves with the global, albeit much smaller, groan of Evolution users worldwide as their favorite mail/calendar/VM stress test/TDP pusher crashes yet again.
OpenOffice, OTOH, is quite ready to compete with the likes of MS Office for the office suite bloatware crown.
Uhh... Xeon *is* x86. Maybe you're confusing it with Itanium, which is non-x86?
1. Raw MHz means nothing. SGI's MIPS-based machines perform excellently, at the top of the Spec2000 benchmarks, and extensively blow away both x86 and Itanium I. There isn't enough data yet to draw any conclusions about Itanium II. I would take an Irix-based Origin system any day over the completely unproven IA64.
Huh? There's data out there, let's look at some of the SPEC results:
CPU specint specfp
600MHz R14k 483 495
800MHz Itanium 314 645
1GHz Itanium II 807 1356
So the MIPS CPU does pretty well considering its low clockspeed, but Itanium II has a much higher peak perf. When you combine that with the monstrous bandwidth of an O3K machine, you get something pretty powerful.
2. Having developed for NUMA architectures, I am confused as to why this machine is designed the way it is. Unless they've done extensive modifications to the kernel, and especially the brain-damaged Linux thread libraries, you're going to end up with what are supposed to be threads of the same process running with different memory access properties.
Linux 2.4 with the O(1) scheduler is pretty good at SMP thread scheduling, but since the latencies accross NUMAflex are so low, process and thread placement aren't as important as they would be on, say, an IBM NUMA box, which is much more 'non-uniform' wrt memory latency. The 2.5 kernel should be even more scalable, as it'll probably include a NUMA-aware scheduler.
3. Even more confusing, what little press there is on this machine claims constant data access to anywhere in the combined memory space. NUMA by definition is non-uniform memory access. What's with that?
I imagine they're referring to the fact that you don't have to use a message passing API to do your app development, i.e. all the memory of the machine is in one big address space. Of course accessing different nodes will result in varying access times, but that's obvious.
I disagree... if you need a decent server, especially a scalable one, this machine is for you. You can start out small and add stuff as you need it.
Wanna run a database? This machine is perfect. You can add to more CPUs to the system if you need them. You can also add more I/O to the system independently, w/o changing your CPU count unless you need to. For those reasons, this machine would also be great as a general purpose server for running apps of any sort that need server class I/O and CPU power.
Wanna run some crash simulation codes? Again, this machine is perfect. You can run a threaded version or an MPI version and get tremendous performance because of the massive memory bandwidths and low latencies that this system provides.
OTOH, if you wanna run Quake or UT you should probably get a Clawhammer or one of those hyperthreaded P4s.
SGI is a dying company
This machine is the most general purpose machine that SGI has put out in a long time, due to the fact that it runs Linux on Intel. This should mean bigger markets will be available to SGI, hopefully preventing its demise.