It’s December 11th which means it’s now 2 weeks until Christmas day. My daughter Lela is 8 months old today, oh yea and it’s my birthday. I’d actually forgotten my birthday was this week until yesterday when I was looking at my schedule and noticed it was the 10th. This will be Lela’s first Christmas, so I setup the photo studio the other day and took some pics of the family together. I also took one of Lela by herself that we’ve entered into a local Baby’s First Christmas photo contest. I’ll post links to them on my Flickr site once I’ve added them. Speaking of Flickr, I’ve posted a sample of the photos from my SC’07 trip to Reno, NV.
Category Archives: Tech
Google seeks renewable energy
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…
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.