thinking sysadmin

As a sysadmin that supports multiple R users, a post late last year on InsideHPC drew my attention – Parallel framework for statistical analysis package “R”.  The creators of the Simple Parallel R INTerface have “designed and built a prototype framework that allows the addition of parallelised functions to R to enable the easy exploitation of HPC systems.” (paper, source code)  In other words, a system that lets R users run on a cluster without learning parallel programming.
Read the rest of this entry »

Apparently, disk arrays are sensitive sorts that respond poorly when yelled at:

Makes me wonder how much engineering that I never thought about goes into designing disk shelves to keep drives insulated from vibrations. The Fishworks analytics interface is dazzling – wish I had that yesterday when I was looking at a possible Exchange I/O performance issue with perfmon…