July 18, 2004 Archives

I liked it. I think it's going to be a cool spin-off with bad guys that make the Goa'uld look like playground bullies. The new digital Stargates in Atlantis are pretty spiffy looking. The only problem I had with it was that the new team had absolutely no trouble communicating with they aliens they found in a whole other galaxy millions of light years away. I'm still looking forward to the upcoming shows though. Hopefully the Stargate writers don't fall into the same trap that the Star Trek writers seem to keep falling into and recycling plots.

It's a hot toasty day after yesterday's climbs devastated the group. Today is a relatively flat stage, which I'm sure will be used as a welcome rest stage after yesterday's stage and in preparation for tomorrow's stage heading into the Alps. I don't expect too much of a change in the standings today unless something big happens. I expect Voekler may hang onto the yellow jersey for another day unless yesterday's effort left him too drained to stay close to Armstrong.

Today's OLN word of the day is BREAK AWAY.

Yesterday's beach picnic turned out reasonably well. The rain stayed away long enough to get everything grilled, people to eat and spend some time playing on the beach. As expected, I spent most of the time walking back and forth between the two grills we had going to cook all the food. Didn't have quite as many people come by as we expected, so there was plenty of food left over. And just as I planned, setting out the pulled pork a little after most people filled up on burgers and hot dogs ("Oh wait, there's some pulled pork barbeque too!") meant that there was plenty of pulled pork left over for me :). Excellent...

This would be a pretty sweet machine to get my hands on. 1024 Itanium 2 processors all acting as a single computer running off a single Linux image, rather than 1024 separate nodes like in regular clusters. Throw in 3TB RAM and 370TB of storage and you've got some serious computing at your fingertips. When it's operational, it alone will account for 1/6 of NCSA's computing power and doubles their existing storage space.

The SGI® Altix® system, to be named Cobalt, will consist of 1,024 Intel® Itanium® 2 processors running the Linux® operating system, 3 terabytes of globally accessible memory, and 370 terabytes of SGI® InfiniteStorage that will serve as the Center's shared file system, accessible by other high-performance computing resources within NCSA.

Found at Slashdot.