Author Archives: Clay

About Clay

I'm a Data Center Operations Engineer in beautiful Charleston, SC. I'm happily married to my wonderful wife Nan and we have an teenage daughter Lela. I'm a total geek. I got into electronics when I was around 9 or 10 and got hooked on computers shortly thereafter. I also love Sci-Fi, (not fantasy) particularly Star Trek. My favorite outdoor activities include rollerblading, biking and hiking. I'm also a bit of a car guy and amateur racing driver.

FCC wants to remake mistake

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FCC chief favors waivers for Tribune – USATODAY.com

Sometimes I have to wonder if FCC chief Kevin Martin truly understands the purpose of his organization. The FCC already made the questionable decision to waive the rules prohibiting Tribune Co. (or any one entity) from controlling multiple media outlets in a single market. The waiver was to expire within 2 years or the sale of the company. Now a new investor wants to buy out Tribune, but doesn’t want to have to deal with the restrictions and Martin doesn’t seem to mind. The whole point of the restriction is to encourage competition and prevent one group from controlling information in a particular area. The idea is that the more points of view the public has available, the better informed they’ll be. On the one hand you could rationalize the decision in that you’d essentially just be extending the waiver to the new owner. However, the expiration clause was put there for a reason. A saying comes to mind: “two wrongs don’t make a right.”

Google seeks renewable energy

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Google’s Next Frontier: Renewable Energy – New York Times

It looks like Google is getting serious about finding sources of renewable energy to power their datacenters. The financial sector has been predictably pessimistic. It’s really a wonder they don’t get it. Google consumes an enormous amount of power with it’s datacenters. It only makes sense that they would look to renewable sources of energy to both reduce their expenses and lessen their impact on the environment. As processors have grown more powerful, they’ve also grown more power hungry. One of the speakers at the Supercomputing ’07 conference (it may have been DOE undersecretary for science Raymond Orbach, but I can’t remember for sure…) pointed out how ironic it is that some of the systems currently in use for studying global climate change may actually be helping cause it. It’s likely much the same with Google’s massive datacenters.

SC’07, here I come…

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In about 30 minutes, I’ll begin my 9-hour journey to Reno, Nevada to attend the 2007 conference on supercomputing, networking storage and analysis otherwise known as SC’07. One of my responsibilities over the last 4 years has been to manage a supercomputer cluster. We started out with a 48-node cluster made of relatively inexpensive generic PCs. I’ve since replaced that with a system based on multi-core multi-processor server blades. Hopefully the information and experience gained at this conference will help me improve the performance of this new cluster. Plus, on the geeky side, I’ll get to see all sorts of expensive gear I’d probably never see otherwise. 🙂 Oh yea, and it’s in Reno.