The forced reboot, The ISIOLO project and the very fast bicycle
Aww!! Such power. Dormant.
And so, cameth the timeth.
And cometh the time, cometh the man.
[fast bicycle story deleted by language editor]
I have dropped out of 2 dear engagements in the last 10 days.
First of all, I painfully, and with alot of grief in my heart, withdrew my AngryKenyans game from the PivotEast. This was to pave way and make more time/focus for the ISIOLO Cluster.
I firmly believe in PivotEast and all it entails, my only reservations being it’s focus on ‘seeking to impress so as to get funding’ rather than ‘building something scalable and organic’.
Then, after 4 years, I officially resigned as the CTO/Coder of Symbiotic. Your emails to me on the Symbiotic address will not be responded to again.
I will now work as a freelancer and a private consultant in a number of IT disciplines. At night, I will be available for hire as a commercial code worker. Trust me, we can do it till morning. And that is all I am going to say. Sitaongea mbaya. Sitaongea mob.
David H M told me : “Salim, solo is less disappointing; more pressure.”. So the time is good and the field is open.
Moving on.
So, all the hardware for the ISIOLO Cluster is finally here. The inventory gives any techie an instant iBoner. The final specs and config we agreed on based on the budget constraints are enough to build a 8-node monster. The final list was:
- ASUS Motherboard. Yes. No one else comes even close to the P8Z77-VLK beasts.
- 16 GB of Ram per node.
- 1 Corei5 CPU per node [CPU is really inconsequential as we are on a GPU Cluster]
- 4 ATI 7970 GPUs per node [3 GB Ram per GPU = 12 GB GPU Ram per node][3788.8 GFlops per GPU = 15 Teraflops per node. I know. I know.]
- 8 x 128 GB Samsung SSDs. Ofcourse, we had to go with Samsung. There was no contest here on IO tests.
- Cisco SFS 7000P Infiniband Switch. 10 GBPS speed.
- G-Technology G-Speed Q 8TB High-Speed Raid Array with eSATA [3 times faster than FireWire 800].
What more would a geek ask for.
Work starts Monday. We build it part by part. We will document the process. The core team will consist of @afrowave, @sporkmonger, @paulitrix and yours truly.
Then once built, we will amaze Kenya. Made in Africa, and not mediocre.
Focus on vitu za wasee wanoma. Si CSS2. [Salim, acha matusi].
This is the last time I will talk about the Cluster here, officially. Any more news, facts, live/daily blog of progress and milestones etc will be communicated via the ISIOLO Project Official Site.
The first blog post there will be a detailed explanation of why we chose each and every part, above, for the ISIOLO Project.
Back to code.
Wazi.
