Date: Fri, 23 Oct 1998 18:01:39 -0400 (EDT) From: Scott Lewis <scott@bach.ce.gatech.edu> To: Christopher C Chimelis <chris@beezer.med.miami.edu> Subject: Re: Dpkg 1.4.0.31 works!!! + ALS news from the front Way to go guys. I know we all appreciate the hard work and long hours you are putting in. I was hoping to see you all at the Atlanta Linux Showcase. But it's a long drive/flight, I guess. 20 minutes for me. Tee hee. Well, since you couldn't be there, I'll report on Alpha-related things that were present. Metrolink had Metro-X running on a 21164-600 dual-video card, twin-headed beast of a machine. Looked quite good, from the brief demo I saw. Linux Hardware Solutions also had a 21164-600 up and running, with some kind of experimental 3-D chip/SW package. Kicked some serious tail. BTW, both of the above were running Xaos. It seemed a bit slow, until I saw that there were multiple sessions running, in addition to some really cool GL demos. The Debian boys were there, but only on Intel. At least they were playing Quake, so I guess it is OK. I went to 3 of the sessions offered, in addition to the Keynote Speech by Allen Miner of Oracle. No mention of further ports, but he was quite upbeat about Linux's essential position in the market. He was way Anti-MS, maybe due to his constant laptop problems in Powerpoint, maybe due to the rabid crowd, maybe due to his employer, or maybe even due to common sense. As for the conferences, I saw Larry Augustin of VA Research on Linux Hardware Benchmarks. Quite informative, lots of little tricks towards using the standard benchmarks to track down a myriad of hardware problems. I saw Simon Horman give a speech on high-availability servers. He seemed to mostly stick to NFS, but did a bit on AFS, and several variants of cacheing-NFS. Also, I saw Britt Kinsler, a local COO for a company that builds SW interfaces for thin servers, ie print servers, CD-ROM servers, etc. They were a DOS shop, until serious problems forced them to rethink that. Out of chance they found a certain free OS, that came with necessary development tools. Now, they are a RedHat Support Partner. This is in a span of a year. I guess the learning curve isn't so steep afterall. Finally, I saw Don Becker's presentation on Beowulf clusters. Droooollll... This was probably my favorite. He went into the problems that he and NASA are solving with their clusters, mentioned several other really big clusters (including LLNL's 140 CPU Alpha cluster Avalon), the networking topology, HW setup, recommendations, and requirements, SW design for parallelism, but ran out of time to give us the full breadth of the project. He did touch on some truly interesting projects, one where the machines are acting as a huge RAID cluster (2GB) with a goal of increasing the output to 1Gbps. Apparently they are stuck at a mere 450Mbps or so. My memory bandwidth isn't that fast. Sigh.... Finally, he mentioned that he has two boxes at home, a K6-2 350 and an Alpha. Hooray for the good guys. I'll post more tomorrow... Scott Lewis Computer Support Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Georgia Institute of Technology scott.lewis@ce.gatech.edu (404) 894-2210 "Make it idiot proof and someone will make a better idiot." -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-alpha-request@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org