I have been meaning to write about what I saw at the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology (AGBT) meeting a couple weeks ago, but have not had time to sit and generate a long post. So I will try to post several shorter entries as I get time. The best session at AGBT was on Saturday afternoon, Future Horizons in Genome Exploration (chaired by my boss Elaine Mardis). It started with an entertaining talk... Full Post
What is Lustre? It is a cluster file system developed by Cluster File Systems, Inc., which was recently purchased by Sun. We do not have much experience with Lustre but we have played around a bit with it in house and I have talked a lot with other centers who do use it (like Sanger). The main advantages of Lustre are that it is very scalable and can sustain very high performance. The two main... Full Post
We have a lot of disk storage at The Genome Center. Over 700 TB. We have a wide variety of storage in use. Different architectures: local, SAN, NAS, iSCSI. Different vendors: Hitachi, EMC, StorageTek/Sun, NetApp, BlueArc, Dell, etc. Different access methods: direct attach, NFS, and CIFS. I am not going to talk about all these options in this post. I am going to focus on accessing NAS storage via NFS. We have products from two... Full Post
Since Super Tuesday, the campaigns have really started to settle into a consistent language that is interesting to parse. On the Republican side, Sen. John McCain, as the presumptive nominee, has stopped talking about his Republican competitors. The media is not quite ready to take up this language because they need stuff to report. More recently, with Sen. Barack Obama's victories in the past week, Sen. McCain has begun to focus his attention on the... Full Post
Sen. John McCain will be the Republican nominee. How is this the case even though McCain does not have the necessary delegates? While McCain has been able to build his large delegate lead in the many previous Republican primaries and caucuses that have been winner take all, many of the upcoming contests award delegates proportionally. So Mike Huckabee (or Mitt Romney, who still leads Huckabee in delegates and has only "suspended" his campaign) would not... Full Post