The recent fourth quarter reports from server manufacturers was dim, and Sun Microsystems was by far the worst (with a 35% loss compared to the same period last year). On top of this, Sun just announced in October (within their 8K filing for the SEC) intentions to lay off 3000 employees in the next 12 months. Infoworld also had a nice piece on this; according to Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, the company is losing $100 million each month the European Union regulators put off accepting the merger.

With the Oracle acquisition in progress, there are a lot of questions about the future viability of Sun Microsystems, and of some of its products.

I don’t think people realize just how important the Sun group of products are, and what an impact it would have if most – or even some – of the products were cancelled. Consider this list of Sun products:

• Java.
• Solaris – and OpenSolaris.
• SPARC – and OpenSPARC.
• MySQL. There was a recent report from the 451 Group that suggests that usage of MySQL may fall off based on the current uncertainty around Sun.
• StarOffice – and OpenOffice.
• VirtualBox (and associated virtual products). Virtualbox also has an open source version, and was just updated to version 3.1 with new features. InformationWeek and eWeek both had excellent articles on the new Virtualbox.
• Sun Modular Data Centers (originally with the codename Project Blackbox).
• The Lustre Filesystem.

Most of the most popular products were mentioned by Oracle in their Sun Acquisition FAQ (PDF), stating that they will increase money spent on each over what Sun spent. These products include: Java, Solaris, SPARC, StarOffice, NetBeans, virtualization products, Glassfish, and MySQL. Other products were not mentioned – such as Lustre, the Modular Data Center, and others.

The list above also does not list the technologies that were spearheaded by Sun – and some still are: ZFS, NFS, NIS (and NIS+), dtrace, containers, and smc.

It would be unfortunate – and materially significant – if Sun were to go under or if any of the majority of their products were to be cancelled. One can only hope this does not happen…

Wait, some of you might be thinking. Who is Robin Tunney?

Robin Tunney; image courtesy of tvdramas.about.com

I think Tunney was slated to be a star when she started cropping up in movies in the 1990s. While stardom didn’t happen for her, she’s had steady work, currently starring on The Mentalist, a CBS procedural. She was supposed to co-write a book on feminism with her friend Liz Phair, with whom she worked on the movie Cherish. I’m still waiting for that last one.

For many in my age group, we know her from back-to-back appearances in Empire Records and The Craft. As both movies were slumber party staples in my friend group, featured teen girl characters, and were accompanied by popular soundtracks, I knew I’d need to revisit them.

Empire Records came out in 1995 and developed a bit of a cult following, despite poor reviews and a dismal box office performance. It also instilled a personal desire to work at a record store, particularly an indie fighting to stay that way. At 13, it looked so cool and fun to “work” all day at such a place with hip teens and twentysomethings.

Well, maybe not them specifically, as the characters in Empire Records aren’t believeable as people so much as underwritten Generation X versions of cool kids dreamt up by a team of movie executives: there’s Joe, the anti-establishment boomer-era owner (Anthony LaPaglia); Lucas, the Zen-like hipster (Rory Cochrane); A.J., the sensitive artist in love with the unattainable Corey (Johnny Whitworth); Corey, the wholesome speed freak perfectionist (Liv Tyler); Gina, Corey’s slutty best friend who wants to be in a band (Renée Zellweger); Mark, the stoner (Ethan Embry); Berko, the rocker who clocks in between gigs (Coyote Shivers, who was married to Tyler’s legendary mother Bebe Buell at the time); and Debra, the rebel girl accountant who shaves her head after attempting suicide (Tunney).

Oh, they are so selling out; image courtesy of chartrigger.blogspot.com

The writing is the movie’s biggest problem, though I’ll never understand why casting directors thought someone as boring as Tyler would ever be a huge star (I’d ask this question again later in the decade when Katie Holmes started landing movie roles). The motivations of the characters, though meant to be read as young and madcap, are childish and inconsistent. The boys pine after girls, eat pizza, get high, and glue quarters to the floor. The girls pine after has-been teen idols doing in-stores, alternate between loving and hating each other, and get together with the boys who pine after them. Both sexes deliver such profound lines like “If I can love her in that skirt, than this must really be it” and “I went to rock and roll heaven, and I wasn’t on the guest list.”

That second line is the answer given to a question about bandaged wrists. It’s delivered to withering effect by Debra, potentially the movie’s most interesting character. She’s not glamourous like her female co-workers or sophomoric like her male colleagues. She also seems to have gone through real pain, deeper than the surface angst used to promote OK Soda and perhaps closer to the actual pain brought on by parental neglect and low self-esteem. In the early 1990s, these and other issues were particularly relevant to young girls, some of whom would form or discover riot grrl and queercore and develop their own queer and/or feminist identities. We only get a sense of Debra’s absent mother, resistent intellect, boredom with men, feelings of inadequacy, and the hope for something better.

Note: I’d recommend watching director Allan Moyle’s far-superior Times Square. Rest assured that the tale of two girl runaways falling in love amidst downtown New York’s early-80s squalor will get its due on this blog.   

It’s weird that slashed wrists bridge Tunney’s two major performances to date. Clearly suicide, perhaps most unfortunately personified by Kurt Cobain, was on young people’s minds at the time. I’d hedge that this has more to do with class frustration, racial injustice, conflicted feelings about sexual orientation, coming out to unsupportive families and communities, dysfunctional home lives, and a lack of any real support system. I’d also add that it’s an on-going problem.

Absent mothers also connect Debra and Sarah, the latter of whom lost her mother during childbirth. As The Craft was originally pitched as “Carrie meets Clueless,” it seems necessary to point out that these movies feature girls with compromised mother-daughter relationships. Carrie’s mother is a crazed witch. Cher Horowitz, like so many other fairytale heroines before her, lost her mother at an early age and has only an idealized memory of her. Sarah has similar baggage, along with the additional burden of being responsible for her mother’s death. Oh, and carrying on the ability to perform witchcraft. That’s a hell of a lot for any teenage girl to shoulder, especially when she’s moving to Los Angeles with her family.     

A heartening aspect of The Craft , no doubt motivated by how successful Clueless was, is the presence of girlfriends. Sarah meets shy Bonnie (played by Neve Campbell) and becomes friends with a trio of Goth girls. Two other movies came out in 1996 that focused on girl gangs – Girls Town and Foxfire. For a more nuanced analysis of these two movies and their depictions of homosociality and developing feminist politics, I highly recommend checking out my friend Kristen’s thesis Revenge, Girl Style. 

The Craft entertains the progressive potential of girl friendship, particularly for outcasts. There are also hints at the queer possibilities of homosocial bonding and witchcraft. It even contains racially charged moments, particularly when Rochelle (played by Rachel True), the coven’s lone African American member, casts a spell on Laura Lizzie (Christine Taylor), a popular blonde who is on the swim team with her. After enduring Lizzie’s racist comments about her hair, Rochelle turns her bald, thus rebelling against normative, white-centric notions of feminine beauty. 

But these suggestions are sidelined. Because what the movie is really about is the battle between Tunney’s kind-hearted Sarah and Fairuza Balk’s destructive ringleader Nancy, who is jealous of her frenemy’s natural aptitude for witchcraft. It should also be noted that Nancy is working-class and coded as queer. The movie makes a considerable effort to undo her queerness, putting men in between her and Sarah, whether they be ex-boyfriends or Manon, the supernatural male figure that the girls worship. The movie ends with Nancy trying to kill Sarah, resulting in a showdown that tears the group apart, causes Sarah to move, and leads to Nancy being institutionalized. The final shot is of Nancy in a straight-jacket trying to fly out of a padded cell. The movie’s message: we are the weirdos, mister. Just don’t expect us to stay friends or keep a hold of our sanity. So much for sisterhood.

Nancy's farewell; image courtesy of channel4.com

Sisterhood is often lacking in movies, but is emphasized to market teen movies, if only to tap in to the girl market. But much of this was eclipsed in story development to make way for more lucrative prospects, none more pronounced at the time than the soundtrack. A considerable number of American teen movies in the 1990s featured a soundtrack, many boasting songs by alternative rock artists. Unlike The Craft and Empire Records, and more in line with All Over Me, Girls Town and Foxfire paid particular attention toward showcasing female artists, particularly those closely associated with hip hop and the then-waning riot grrrl movement. Scholars like Jeff Smith and Mary Celeste Kearney have addressed this in their work, theorizing that the soundtrack served as a way to cultivate potential audience markets and a source of textual identification for fans.

While female artists are present on the soundtracks to Empire Records and The Craft, they’re not the focus, perhaps out of fear of alienating a broader audience. This might further explain why The Craft soundtrack features covers of popular songs from lesser-known acts. Our Lady Peace contributes a version of The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows,” Heather Nova covers Peter Gabriel’s “I Have the Touch,” and Letters To Cleo take on The Cars’ “Dangerous Type,” a tactic they’d repeat when covering Cheap Trick’s “I Want You To Want Me” for 10 Things I Hate About You at the end of the decade. And let’s not forget the double-nostalgia of former Psychelic Furs’ front man Richard Butler covering The Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now” with his post-Furs project Love Spit Love. 

Cover to "The Craft" soundtrack (Sony, 1996); image courtesy of thesoundtracktoyourlife.co.uk

A major problem both of these movies share, and is evident in other titles of this period and in the Brat Pack movies of the 1980s, is the need to broadly define its characters as members of a generation, rather than as complex young people with particular problems oftentimes informed by their identities. And while ennui and an ironic fluency in popular culture were markers for Gen X, these young adults were more than just sneering (white) kids in flannel, combat boots, and barettes. At least off-camera.

Oftentimes, they were frustrated by how little high school and a liberal arts education could get them in a job market, particularly during the late 1980s and early 1990s when the economy had yet to recover from the 1987 market crash. They were annoyed at the shrine their parents built to the 1960s, as it was clear just how empty and hollow their promises of revolution were. In some ways, they were no different than people my age or boomer hipster Paul Kinsey on Mad Men, turning to interesting records, movies, books, and TV shows, but knowing they wouldn’t make them any happier, politically mobile, or economically viable.

Michael Gladis as Paul Kinsey, proving the every generation has its hipster; image courtesy of readingunderthecovers.blogspot.com

Some of these people formed bands, often annointed with glossy but unremarkable one-word monikers: Sponge, Drill, Lustre, Cracker, Elastica, Spacehog, Dig, Hole, Belly, Hum, Bush, Toadies, Oasis . . . In a particularly cruel example of market imperative, many of these bands broke up or were without major label record deals by the end of the decade.

I still have Elastica's debut album!; image courtesy of forgottenfavorite.com

But it’s hard to convey all of this in a 90-minute movie, especially one that hopes to cash in on the wages of the very demographic these popcorn flicks were hoping to represent. Some did a decent job of conveying this generation’s ambivalence, particularly indies like Kicking and Screaming. I’d also add that Reality Bites highlights these problems, even pointing out the crass ways in which corporate America capitalizes on the very market its created. While I wish Winona Ryder’s filmmaker character Lalaina didn’t end up with Ethan Hawke’s slacker Troy, I understand why she can’t be with Michael (played by director Ben Stiller), who works for an MTV-type network that makes worm’s meat out of her documentary about her friends. 

Richard Linklater’s second feature, Dazed and Confused, did a considerable job at suggesting that Generation X inherited their sense of slacker frustration (and detached nostalgia for Schoolhouse Rock and The Brady Bunch) from their parents. That Linklater cast a bunch of twentysomething unknowns like Joey Lauren Adams, Ben Affleck, Rory Cochrane, Adam Goldberg, Jason London, Matthew McConaughey, Parker Posey, and Marisa Ribisi to essentially play the teenagers and young adults who would become their parents may strengthen Robin Wood’s argument that Dazed is a horror film. 

Some television shows also did a good job articulating the nuances of the slacker era. I’d offer up British programs like Spaced, along with MTV’s Daria and ABC’s My So-Called Life. The latter featured an angsty girl protagonist, complex teenage characters, depicted boomer parents being just as clueless and angsty as their brood, and created an immortal stoner heartthrob named Jordan Catalano (played by Jared Leto), whose band Frozen Embryos changed their name at the end of the series to perhaps the most perfect of Gen X band names: Residue.

Angela Chase (Claire Danes) with the object of her affection; image courtesy of thefbomb.org

But it’s always different for girls, and unfortunate that Tunney and many of the actresses of her generation were not given the consideration they deserved (though I love that Austin Chronicle writer Margaret Moser fancies herself as being like Balk’s character in Almost Famous). Some may attribute this to their flat delivery or lack of believability, but I’d wager that this has more to do with poor character development on the part of screenwriters and the industrial emphasis on youth than it does on the actresses. At 19, Kristen Stewart is playing the slouched-shoulder ingenue of a multi-million-dollar film franchise, its latest installment complete with a soundtrack featuring of-the-moment, indie and indie-friendly artists like Bon Iver, St. Vincent, Lykke Li, Grizzly Bear, and Thom Yorke. I only hope she has that sort of star power at 25.

Kristen Stewart at the "New Moon" premiere in Los Angeles; image courtesy of justjared.buzznet.com

This is a REPOST from HPC Projects published 6-times annually by Scientific Computing World.

The HP Z800

Computers are continuing along their astounding path down the price/performance curve to the point where you can literally put the power of what we not long ago considered a supercomputer on or beside your desk in an office environment. Paul Schreier reviews some of these powerful systems

HPC Projects: October/November 2009

Desktop HPC, personal supercomputers, personal workstations, whatever you call them, there’s no standard definition of what they are. But most suppliers generally agree on what they aren’t: standard office PCs. Simply having lots of cores just isn’t enough of a boost for the applications where desktop HPC is generally applied: typically in engineering design, analysis and visualisation. And as you’ll see in this report, desktop HPC involves not only the familiar tower form factor, but also small racks that accommodate blades and that are designed to sit beside a desk in an office environment.

HP refers to this class of system simply as a ‘workstation’, and Jeff Wood, director of worldwide marketing for workstations, notes some key differences from office PCs. In short, it must have the ability to expand its infrastructure to accommodate large amounts of memory, disk storage, powerful graphics for visualisation and possibly cards with a GPGPU (general-purpose graphical processing units). He also suggests that you not forget about something as mundane as the power supply. Office PCs might have a 300W supply, but when you consider that a high-end graphics card alone might need 250W and the processor can easily need more than 100W, the problems are obvious. Thus, for instance, HP’s Z800 system comes with an 1,100W supply. And while it can run on standard line voltage and without any special cooling – which makes it easy to place anywhere in an office environment – there is a water-cooling option in the event you want to keep fan noise to a minimum.

In the mind of Transtec’s HPC specialist Oliver Tennert, HPC focuses on the application, not the system itself; HPC denotes the goal. He adds that you can’t simply take off-the-shelf components and build an HPC system; it requires special software and, in the case of a GPU card, also a compiler.

It’s reasonable to assume that nobody will ever have the fastest computer at any point in time on their desk, comments Herb Schultz, Deep Computing manager at IBM. The question instead becomes whether a user can run computationally intensive applications that fit within certain constraints – budgets, being in the office environment (low noise, low heat, line power) and having easy-to-manage systems that are standardised and thus run commercial applications.

Who needs desktop HPC?

Which users are most likely to use desktop HPC? According to Ian Miller, senior VP of sales and marketing for Cray’s Productivity Solutions Group, such systems have become particularly affordable and are very attractive for, among others:

• an engineering team looking for its first cluster;
• scientists/engineers hitting the limits of PC performance;
• a software developer looking for a dedicated system for development and testing;
• a design/simulation project that is just starting but needs room to grow.

In this regard, Steve Conway, research VP for HPC at market research firm IDC, points out that users are moving into this class of system both top-down (where users want immediate access to considerable power rather than waiting to have their jobs scheduled on a cluster) and bottom-up (such as a small engineering-services firm where the customer says ‘here’s the part we want’, but the company can’t get the work done efficiently on a standard office PC). In addition, rather than classify desktop HPC by number of cores or other features, IDC categorises these systems as those selling in the range between $10k and $100k. According to IDC, sales for this segment in 2008 were $1.96bn, and despite the global recession that number should grow to $2.7bn by 2013.

Amax PSC-2n

The low-end market has been underserved and users have been intimidated says Cray’s Miller. Now it’s no longer so scary, especially with tools such as Windows Cluster Server 2008 and the Intel Cluster Ready (ICR) programme. Configuring a desktop HPC system isn’t simply a matter of putting parts together; making them interact can be a daunting task. Even with a standard desktop PC users can have problems with a disk drive or its driver, and Miller adds that matters become considerably more complex when you have a whole bunch of ‘moving parts’. With ICR, the burden of integration falls on the vendors; users are assured that hardware and software elements all work together, applications will scale and take advantage of advanced architectures.

Almost 1,000 cores in a tower

A recent article in Scientific Computing World (‘A supercomputer chip for every man’, Feb/Mar 2009) gives an extensive introduction into the amazing performing boosts possible with GPGPUs (general-purpose graphic processing units), and Nvidia has packaged one of its processors in a card format that it supplies to various system integrators. Each Tesla card provides 240 computing cores and 1 teraflop of performance, and software written to run on GPGPUs has been shown to run as much as 100x faster than on a conventional processor.

A popular configuration among desktop HPC suppliers is one that combines dual quad-core Xeon 5500 Series (Nehalem) processors in a tower that can accommodate as many as four Tesla cards for a total of 960 cores and 4 teraflops of performance. Prices for such systems are approximately $12k depending on features such as disk space and memory.

One supplier in this category is Amax, which product manager James Huang notes was selected as one of Nvidia’s Tesla launch partners with the PSC-2n personal supercomputer. Its 1,200W power supply runs on 110 to 240V AC without any special cooling. In fact, notes Huang, because each Tesla card can consume as much as 200W, heat requirements mean that you can’t simply adapt any old chassis for such a system; these must be custom designed with adequate cooling for all system components.

Huang further explains that the education and research markets are showing great interest in Tesla systems, but that the biggest obstacle is on the software side. The cost savings with hardware are sometimes offset by the softwaredevelopment costs where it might be necessary to recode 30 per cent of existing programs to take advantage of the Tesla parallel processing. He also adds that these desktop HPC systems are sometimes used as a proof of concept for GPGPU computing, later leading to a full-on cluster deployment.

Super Micro Computer 7046GT-TRF

Along similar lines, Super Micro Computer recently announced a 4-teraflop tower system based on dual Xeon 5500 processors with support for four Tesla cards along with three additional PCIe slots for high-bandwidth I/O. The box also features redundant 93 per cent efficiency 1,400W power supplies. The 7046GT-TRF is housed in a 4U rack-mount convertible tower chassis that supports as many as 11 full-height, full length expansion cards and eight hot-swap 3.5-inch SAS/SATA drives.

A third member of the club offering four Tesla cards with dual Nehalem processors in a tower is Colfax with its CXT5000. The vendor does note that you can use the four Tesla cards only under Linux; Windows requires a discrete graphics card and in that case you can add a maximum of three GPUs.

Further companies with a similarly configured tower include Velocity Micro with its ProMagix VSC240 and Transtec with its 1100R Nehalem supercomputer, which uses vertical rails to accommodate two server cards in a 1U format.

While four appears to be the maximum number of Tesla cards you can plug into a tower, according to the Nvidia website there are even more suppliers offering personal supercomputers with three Tesla cards. They start with some of the players already mentioned (Amax, Colfax and Velocity Micro) and then go on to include Microway (WhisperStation PSC) and Penguin Computing (Niveus HTX). Another member of this group is Silicon Mechanics with its HPCg A2401, which is based on a quad-core AMD Phenom II processor; note, though, that loading three GPU cards results in each PCIe x16 slot operating at x8 speeds – something worth examining no matter which vendor you are looking at.

Nvidia additionally points out that several major OEMs provide Tesla-based personal supercomputers including the HP Z800, the Dell Precision T5500 and T7500 as well as the Lenovo ThinkStation D20 and S20. Consider the Z800 in more detail. This tower configuration comes with two CPU sockets and thus 8 cores using Nehalem processors and it also has support for Intel Hyper-Threading Technology with thread-level parallelism on each processor to give you essentially 16 cores. You can pack the system with up to 192GB of memory and 7.5TB of disk storage, Nvidia Quadro FX graphics and the box can also accommodate two Tesla cards, as well.

HP also points out that at this time the Z800 is the only workstation certified for Parallels Workstation Extreme, software that runs multiple isolated desktops environments simultaneously. You can run multiple operating systems − whether 32- or 64-bit XP, Vista, Windows 7 or even Linux − to support different applications all on the same box and thus to ‘virtualise’ 3D, visualisation and hi-definition video programs at full speed. While running more desktops on each server significantly reduces the total cost of ownership, an interesting concept is that an engineer could, for example, replace multiple workstations sitting on his desk, each one running a different graphics-intensive design or analysis program, such as CAD under Windows and a CFD code under Linux, all on the same hardware.

Deskside racks

Users often place a tower next to their desks, so why not put a small rack there? These systems use a ‘blade’ concept so you can populate them with the processing power you need or can afford. They’ve become quiet enough not to be a distraction in an office environment, they plug into standard wall sockets and weigh little enough that they can be safely placed on standard office floor systems. When on casters, they can be moved around for a quick change in the work location without the need for any special tools.

Cray CX1-LC

A recent offering in this vein comes from Cray, which has expanded its entry-level systems with the CX1-LC (where ‘LC’ refers to ‘light configuration’, supporting four nodes instead of the eight in the CX1). With a base price of less than $12k, it is available with the Xeon 5500 Series and supports from one to four blades for as many as 32 cores of Intel processing; other blades are available for visualisation and with GPGPUs. The 7U box is the same size as the CX1 (31 x 17.5 x 35.5cm) and thus is field upgradeable to a full 8-slot CX1. It rests on a simple deskside pedestal, its 800W power supply plugs into a standard outlet and the box complies with the ISO NR45 noise regulations for general office areas. The system can be easily expanded by connecting up to three chassis with an internal switch infrastructure. An interesting plus is a front-control panel with a touch-screen LCD that supports a configuration wizard and also provides information about local server nodes, the enclosure and modules.

Another example is the BoxClusterDSN. Measuring 568 x 434 x 640mm, this deskside unit provides four positions, each of which can be populated with two quad-core Xeon L5520 processors for a total of 32 cores; it also holds 384GB of memory and 16 hard disks. It is available in two variations, for either 110V or 220V AC. The four nodes are in a proprietary format, but the external enclosure size is the same as a standard rackmount width so it’s possible to put this system into a server rack, if desired. It draws less than 15A of current, weighs fewer than 95lbs and specs a noise level of 51.2dB(A).

Also suited for optional mounting in a 19-inch rack is SGI’s CloudRack X2. It measures 24.4-inches (14U) high and with a base of 17.6 x 41 inches has a footprint of five square feet; it supplies nine slots for fanless and coverless 1U server trays installed vertically as well as 2U available for networking equipment. It accommodates a maximum of 36 processors (216 cores). Running from 180-250V AC (no 110V AC), the CloudRack X2 is thermally optimised to safely operate in ambients up to 40° C (104°F). The vendor supplies a number of trays that take advantage of the latest processor options, including GPGPUs, and most CloudRack trays include support for up to either six or eight SATA or SAS hard drives.

BoxClusterDSN

To address this market, IBM provides the BladeCenter S chassis, a 7U rack-optimised chassis that accommodates 1 to 14 blades and plugs into a standard outlet. The BladeCenter S Office Enablement Kit is the ideal way to deploy it in an everyday office. The kit enables several office-friendly features such as the built-in Acoustical Module, a front locking door, 33 per cent or 4U available for expansion.

The market for computers selling for less than $50k is not nearly as big as people have portrayed it to be claims Herb Schultz of IBM. He believes that desktop supercomputing has not captured the imagination of users. Instead, the model for the delivery of compute cycles is changing. Why buy a system and manage it when you might not always need this extra power? And where users previously had to purchase the service of many nodes for long periods, now they can ‘rent’ hundreds of processors for half a day – computing on demand has become very discrete and inexpensive. Renting cycles in this way can also alleviate a number of problems. There are no worries about sufficient electricity; no system administration is necessary; and there is no liability, because of an extra level of security; data centres supply backup recovery, so you don’t have to worry about what happens if a key computer gets stolen.

Euphoria by Calvin Klein – Eau De Parfum Luminous Lustre Spray 1.7 oz for women Review

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Euphoria by Calvin Klein – Eau De Parfum Luminous Lustre Spray 1.7 oz for women Feature

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Euphoria by Calvin Klein – Eau De Parfum Luminous Lustre Spray 1.7 oz for women Overview

Euphoria by Calvin Klein was introduced in 2005 as a fun, enticing scent for women. The beautiful fragrance starts off with pomegranate, persimmon, and a lovely lush green accord. The heart then blends into a sensual lotus blossom, black orchid which then finishes off with amber, violet, cream and woods.

Euphoria by Calvin Klein – Eau De Parfum Luminous Lustre Spray 1.7 oz for women Specifications

Calvin Klein

*** Product Information and Prices Stored: Nov 26, 2009 09:00:04

32inch lcd hdtv

Click Here —>  NYT ARTICLE  <—

La compagnie anglaise Innermost a fait appel à la joaillière Winnie Lui pour sa collection White. Fait de déchets et d’objets trouvés, ces lustres sont d’un chic surprenant. Chaque lustre est unique. On s’en doutait!

Première création d’envergure de Renée, ce lustre est principalement fait de tuyau de plomberie, de découpes de tôle galvanisée, de miroir et de cristaux. Des mois de travail y ont été consacrés.

Direct from the Press Announcement:

Achieving a 1TB/s sustained bandwidth with existing state-of-the-art storage technologies requires close to 55,440 disk drives, 396 SAN controllers, 792 I/O servers and 132 racks of equipment.

Fusion-io can achieve this same bandwidth with 220 ioDrive Octal cards, housed in Infiniband-attached I/O servers running the Lustre parallel file system. This 1TB/s Fusion-io based solution requires only six racks, or less than 1/20th the rack space of an equivalent, high-performance, hard disk drive-based storage system.

I’ll discuss what this means in a future post.

Clin d’oeil au lustre, le roi des luminaires domestiques

Peu d’infos sur cette œuvre, si ce n’est qu’elle a été présentée à la dixième édition du festival “periferias” de Huesca (Espagne), dans une exposition appelée elle-même “souvenirs”

Sources Outsider mag

Sateen cotton has a luxurious sheen

A sateen cotton has two predominant characteristics: sheen and smoothness. To achieve the satin-like finish, cotton undergoes a treatment, called mercerization, where the fibres are soaked in a bath of sodium hydroxide (i.e., lye) followed with an acid bath. The process originated during the mid-1800’s and was developed by John Mercer. Its soft touch is a result of the weaving process, four over and one under, which puts most of the threads on the surface. Sateen cotton makes for luxurious looking dress shirts.

White Sateen fabric

One of my favorite bars in Austin hands down is Lustre Pearl. It is basically an old house that was gutted, and now features a grand indoor bar, decks on the front and back, chairs all the way around the house, and a huge “back yard” which is kind of like a beer garden. Except for the hoola hoops and ping pong tables. Only in Austin will you find amenities like this.

Lustre Pearl Bar - Front

Did I forget to mention another great feature? I believe I did. Just like the Tiniest Bar in Texas over on 5th street closer to the hub bub the Pearl also has a break in the back yard fence that is the perfect width to allow the Bomb Tacos taco bakery on wheels to serve up fresh tacos all night long. I had the steak and pineapple taco last night in between brews, and it was one of the more memorable mexican food bites I’ve had.

The Pearl is a chill bar that is in a nut shell like going to a cool house party. It’s away from dirty 6th, west 6th, and the warehouse district, so most d-bags and UT students keep their distance. The Clive Bar just opened down the street from the Pearl so if for some reason you do not feel that this bar is as glorious as I’m making it out to be you can go to a little classier but similar concept.

One last reason I love the Pearl (like I really need one, right?): koozies every night.

Get Off My Dong

Voici d’autres modèles pivoines mais ceux ci sont en inox …

Ce modèle s’appelle Adeline , il existe en 6, 8 ou 9 tiges ( il existe une option flora )

Celui ci s’appelle Aurore , il existe en 6 ou 8 tiges .

Ce modèle s’appelle Glania , ici vu de profil en 12 tiges ( existe aussi de 9 à 15 tiges ) et ci dessous vu de dessous :

Celui-ci ‘ Lola Mona ‘ à 20 tiges sur 2 niveaux :

Lustre’yi kurduktan sonra bileşenlerini oluşturma sürecine geçelim…

Lustre Bileşenleri :

• Metadata Server (MDS)
• Metadata Targets (MDT)
• Object Storage Servers (OSS)
• Object Storage Target (OST)
• Lustre clients

MDS :

MDS, üstverinin Lustre client’lar tarafından kullanılabilmesini sağlayan bir sunucudur(MDT aracılığıyla). Her bir MDS, dosya sistemindeki isimleri ve klasörleri yönetir. Aynı zamanda bir veya daha fazla yerel MDT’nin ağ isteklerine karşılık verir.

MDT :

MDT, üstverileri MDS üzerinde saklar. Her dosya sistemi için bir MDT vardır.

OSS :

OSS dosyalara I/O(input/output) servisi sağlamaktadır. Aynı zamanda bir veya daha fazla yerel OST’nin ağ isteklerine karşılık verir. OSS, her biri en fazla 8 TB olmak üzere 2 ile 8 tane arasında OST’ye servis yapabilir.

OST :

OST, dosya verilerini OSS’ler üzerinde saklar. Tek bir Lusre dosya sistemi birden fazla OST bulundurabilir. Bir dosya ile bir OST arasında 1:1 iletişim olmak zorunda değil, hatta performansı artırmak için bir dosya birden fazla OST üzerinden yayınlanabilir.

Lustre Client :

Lustre Client,  belirli komutlara göre veri işleyen ve depolayan bir makine veya masaüstü düğümleri olarak tanımlanabilir. Lustre dosya sistemlerini bağlar.

basit bir lustre kümesi

Şekildeki lustre kümesini oluşturmak için örnek komutlar aşağıda bulunmaktadır :

MDS üzerinde (mds.your.org@tcp0):

mkfs.lustre –mdt –mgs –fsname=large-fs /dev/sda

mount -t lustre /dev/sda /mnt/mdt

OSS1 üzerinde :

mkfs.lustre –ost –fsname=large-fs –mgsnode=mds.your.org@tcp0 /dev/sdb

mount -t lustre /dev/sdb/mnt/ost1

OSS2 üzerinde :

mkfs.lustre –ost –fsname=large-fs –mgsnode=mds.your.org@tcp0 /dev/sdc

mount -t lustre /dev/sdc/mnt/ost2

]]> http://utkuulusahin.wordpress.com/2009/08/16/lustrenin-kurulumu/ Sun, 16 Aug 2009 20:39:17 +0000 utkuulusahin http://utkuulusahin.wordpress.com/2009/08/16/lustrenin-kurulumu/

Lustre’nin ne olduğunu öğrenerek bu konuda ciddi bir ilerleme kaydettik :p                               Şimdi kuruluma geçelim. Açıkcası lustrenin resmi sitesinde kurulum aşaması yeterince açıklayıcı değil, hatta bazı yanıltıcı(yani şu anda doğru olmayan) bilgiler içermekte. Portakal Teknoloji’deki stajımda  lustreyi kurarken 3 – 4 farklı kaynaktan yararlanmıştık ve Bora hocanın ısrarlı uyarılarıyla bunları bir doküman haline getirmiştim. Ubuntu 8.04 işletim sisteminde hazırladığım kurulum dökümanını sizlerler paylaşıcağım.

Lustreyi bilgisayarınızda çalıştırabilmek için öncelikle, lustre yamasını kullanarak çekirdek derlemeniz gerekmekte.

Öncelikle “http://www.sun.com/software/products/lustre/get.jsp” adresinden lustre-1.5.6.1 indirilir. (Aslında son olarak lustre 2.0 versiyonu duyuruldu ancak ubuntuda lustre -1.5.6 versiyonu için paketler bulunduğu için diğer versiyonlarda sorun yaşanmaktadır!)

» Aşağıdaki komutla indirilen dosya açılır :

tar -xvvzf lustre-1.6.5.1.tar.gz

» Daha sonra kernel derlemek için gerekli paketleri yükleyelim :

sudo apt-get install build-essential bin86 kernel-package libqt3-headers libqt3-mt-dev wget libncurses5 libncurses5-dev quilt

» /usr/src konumuna gelelim :

cd /usr/src

lustre/kernel_patches/which_patch dosyasından hangi kernel versiyonunun uygun olduguna bakıyoruz (2.6.22 – uygun olarak gözükmesine rağmen Sun microsystems çalışanlarından birisi bu versiyonun sorunlu olduğunu söylemişti ve en azından bana ubuntu 8.04 de sorun çıkarmıştı)

» Kernel resmi sitesinden uyumlu kernel’i indirelim ve açalım :

wget -c http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/linux-2.6.18.tar.bz2 && tar -xvjf linux-2.6.18.tar.bz2

rm -rf linux && ln -s /usr/src/linux-2.6.18 linux && cd /usr/src/linux

» lustre/kernel_patches/kernel_configs (kuracağımız kernel versiyonunun “.config” dosyasını yedekliyoruz. ör : “kernel-2.6.18-2.6-vanilla-i686″ )

» aşağıdaki “…” yerlere bilgisayarınızdaki tam konumları yazmanız gerekmekte :

cd /usr/src/linux
ln -s ../lustre/kernel_patches/series/..2.6.18.series series
ln -s ../lustre/kernel_patches/patches patches
quilt push -av

» yedeklenen “.config” dosyası, bu konuma kopyalanır ve adı .config olarak değiştirilir. Daha sonra :

make oldconfig
make xconfig - make menuconfig

make-kpkg clean
make-kpkg --initrd --revision=386 kernel_image kernel_headers modules_image

“Burada “386″ yerine yazılabilecek “k7″, “686″ gibi mimari isimler sadece bilgilendirme / hatırlatma içindir. Derleme işlemi üzerinde bir etkisi yoktur.”

——————-

ufak bir not :

get_src_version ile başlayan error çıkarsa – (ikinci kernel derlemede genellikle olabiliyor)
…../linux/scripts/mod/sumversion.c       içine #include <limits.h> eklenerek bu sorunun üstesinden gelinebiliyor…
——————-

» cd /usr/src konumunda oluşan iki adet “.deb” paketi kurulur :

dpkg -i linux*2.6.25*.deb

reboot

» derlenen kernel’ e girdiğimizde lustre için kernel yamasını tamamlamış bulunuyoruz…

» daha sonra :

apt-get install build-essential module-assistant dpatch

m-a update
m-a a-i lustre

» oluşan .deb paketleri “dpkg -i ….” komutuyla derlenir

reboot

modprobe -v lustre
komutu error vermiyorsa işlem tamamdır, lustre sorunsuz bir şekilde çalışıyor demektir…